Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence

July 27, 2019

Wow, if true this tweet by Lana Puckett would be depressing news for progressives like me who detest Donald Trump. I emailed the tweet to myself after I saw mention of it in a separate tweet by George Conway, a fierce critic of Trump despite his wife being a senior advisor to Trump.

This is what Conway said about Puckett's tweet: "um, remind me who the patron saint of porn-star payoffs is again"

Given that the book consists of 464 pages of quite intense philosophizing, I may not be writing blog posts about it for a while. So here's some excerpts from the provocative review.

I've wondered about what kind of society would make the most sense in a world that had given up belief in an afterlife.

After all, if this life were considered the only life anyone would ever have, it sure seems like we humans would value the quality of this life considerably more highly than we do now.

Here's some glimpses of how Hägglund views this question.

Once we seriously consider the consequences of life without end, the prospect is not only horrifying but meaningless (as the philosopher Bernard Williams argued years ago). An eternity based on what Louise Glick called "absence of change" would be not a rescue from anything but an end of everything meaningful.

Hägglund puts forth his eloquent case: "Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care. And to rest in peace is not to be fulfilled: It is to be dead."

...A liberal rabbi or pastor might object that Haaglund is unhelpfully hung up on eternity. Eternity is not at the heart of what people care about; they hardly ever spend time envisaging it. But Hägglund's central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn't know itself as such.

He wants to out religionists as closet secularists. When we ardently hope that the lives of people we love will go on and on, we don't really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last "for a longer time."

So his reply would probably be: Just admit that your real concerns and values are secular ones, grounded in the frailty, the finitude, and the rescue of this life. He makes a similar point in relation to Buddhism.

He is happy to welcome, as essentially secular, those popular forms of meditation and mindfulness which insist on our being "present in the moment"; but he chides as religious and deluded those doctrinal aspects of Buddhism which insist on detachment, release from anxiety, and an overcoming of worldly desire.

...But if we are to cherish this life, we have to treat what we do as an end in itself. "The real measure of value," Hägglund says, "is not how much work we have done or have to do (quantity of labor time), but how much disposable time we have to pursue and explore what matters to us (quality of free time)."

...And yet Hägglund's very vulnerability increases my regard for his project. I admire his boldness, perhaps even his recklessness. And his fundamental secularity seems right: since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge.

Hägglund offers a fulfillment of what Marx meant by "irreligious criticism," a criticism aimed at both religion and capitalism, because both forms of life obscure what is really going on: that, as Hägglund puts it, "our own lives -- our only lives -- are taken away from us when our time is taken from us."

We are familiar with the secular charge that religion is "life-denying." Hägglund wants to arraign capitalism for a similar asceticism. Religion, you might say enforces asceticism in the name of the spiritual; capitalism enforces asceticism in the name of the material.

April 28, 2019

Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who lost a finger in the attack on the Chabad of Poway synagogue where one person was shot to death yesterday, has a perfect right to be deeply upset by what happened to his congregation.

But today I heard Goldstein speak about what he thinks the proper response should be to the attack, and I heartily disagree with him.

Goldstein said that prayer used to be allowed in public schools. Now, it isn't. Instead, the Rabbi wants every school day to begin with a moment of silence. We should know that God created us, he said.

There's a big problem with this -- the separation of church and state. Children shouldn't be subjected to a religiously-motivated moment of silence, which really would be the only reason for such a practice.

The remarks I heard from Rabbi Goldstein made it clear that he wants God to be reintroduced into public schools. He didn't say why he thinks this would prevent mass shootings, probably because there is no reason to think that it would make any difference in United States gun violence.

And I want to take note for other victims who suffered yesterday, physically, emotionally, spiritually. The best we can do to combat is to grow, build, and be stronger, stronger and stronger. And yes, every single one of us can do that. I look around at the myriad of cameras that are here.

The message needs to be brought out to the public ‘How does a 19-year-old, a teenager, have the audacity, the sickness, the hatred to publicize such anti-Semitism in [h]is manifesto? How does he come here to a house of worship to do what he did?’

Perhaps we have to go back a little earlier and think about what are we teaching our children? What are we educating our children? We need to perhaps consider re-introducing in our public-school system a moment of silence when children can start the day with pausing and thinking, ‘Why am I created? Why am I here? And what am I going to do?’

After listening to Goldstein speak, I heard a MSNBC panel of experts discuss the synagogue attack. They had a very different take on the cause of anti-Semitism. It was pointed out that anti-Semitic attacks rose by 57% in 2017, the year after Trump was elected. Trump's implicit and explicit endorsement of white nationalism is a likely reason.

A panel member also said that the Department of Homeland Security has eliminated a branch that was focused on combatting domestic terrorism. So the truth, this person said, is that the Trump administration isn't doing everything it should to reduce the threat from people who espouse white supremacy and white nationalism.

They immediately went after the Jews. At their Friday night rally at the University of Virginia, the white nationalists brandished torches and chanted anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans, including “blood and soil” (an English rendering of the Nazi “blut und boden”) and “Jews will not replace us” — all crafted to cast Jews as foreign interlopers who need to be expunged. The attendees proudly displayed giant swastikas and wore shirts emblazoned with quotes from Adolf Hitler. One banner read, “Jews are Satan’s children.”

Yet I heard Rabbi Goldstein speak approvingly of his 15-minute phone conversation with Trump, who reportedly likes the Rabbi's idea for a (useless) moment of silence in public schools.

Our gun culture is the main reason this country has so many gun deaths.

After every mass shooting there's a call for thoughts and prayers. Which, obviously, do exactly nothing to prevent the next mass shooting.

Rabbi Goldstein would be better off giving up his nonsensical moment of silence idea, and instead study the chart below from a CNN story, "How U.S. gun culture compares with the world in five charts." The United States is one of the most religious of advanced nations, yet we have by far the most gun-related deaths per 1 million people.

January 29, 2019

My wife, Laurel, is an avid atheist -- even more so in some respects than I am. She started a MeetUp group here in Salem, Oregon: Freethinking Atheists of Salem. Here's the description of the group.

Are you too logical/rational to believe in religions, conspiracy theories, and beliefs not supported by modern science, yet miss the fellowship church-goers enjoy? Let's meet up monthly for coffee to converse with like-minded people who also share minority status as "nonbelievers" in a predominantly religious believing world.

Let's share what we learn about science, the challenges of being atheists, and support each other in what we know to be supported by reality. We ask for about a one dollar donation to cover the MeetUp cost, and that you support the IKE Box's hospitality by purchasing a drink or snack.

Last night Laurel used the public comment period at a Salem City Council meeting to talk about her concern that a minister called for prayer prior to Mayor Chuck Bennett giving the annual "State of the City" address.

Yes, the Mayor's talk wasn't held in a government building, but it was part of his official mayoral duties. As Laurel says in the video below, church and state are supposed to be separated in the United States. Having a Christian minister issue a call for prayer elevates one religion above others.

And also, of course, above the 30% or so of people in Oregon who don't embrace any religion, or God. Yet the minister ends his invocation/prayer with "In Jesus' name."

There's absolutely no reason why people who choose to attend a secular event should have to listen to religious talk.

I'm glad my wife made this point to the Mayor and City Council. Hopefully next year there won't be any religious invocation. Or if there is, that it feature a representative of a different faith than Christianity.

January 21, 2019

Last Saturday there was another Women's March here in Salem, Oregon. As I did with the 2017 and 2018 marches, I took a bunch of photos, then shared them in an Adobe Spark web page that you can peruse by clicking on the image below.

There were some Christian fundamentalist counter-protestors at the event on the Capitol Mall.

I'll share a photo of their signs, along with my commentary on one of the signs below the Adobe Spark link. Or you can view the photo and my comment on it by clicking on the Women's March Salem 2019 link.

Caution: if you're an avid fan of President Trump, be prepared to see many photos of signs that vilify him.

The "cover girl" (or cover woman) on the web page is my wife, Laurel. She's also an avid atheist who has organized a MeetUp group that convenes every Sunday to support people in the irreligiosity.

Here's the photo of the fundamentalist Christians, along with my commentary.

Here's a closeup of the Christian fundamentalist hate signs. Pleasingly, I'm guilty of all of the "sins" in the sign on the left: I accept abortion, multiple religions, marijuana, porn, alcohol, and same sex relationships. Also, how could these guys be against fornicators? Do they think they're the product of a virgin birth? Me, I'm fine with hell fire, since I'm a proud evolutionist.

July 02, 2018

When they opened a store here in Salem, Oregon, I did some research on the company and wrote a blog post that listed five good reasons not to shop at the store. Here, in headline form, is what I said shoppers at Hobby Lobby were supporting:

(1) Denying contraception coverage to women employed by corporations owned by religious zealots.(2) Teaching the Bible in public schools as "true" and "good."(3) Smuggling artifacts from Iraq, an act that supports terrorism.(4) Supporting the election of Trump.(5) Helping fund a $500 million Museum of the Bible.

Here's another reason not to shop at Hobby Lobby -- the company buys a full page ad in newspapers around the country close to July 4 that in very clear terms calls for the United States to be a Christian theocracy.

This is a photo of the ad that ran in yesterday's Portland Oregonian.

If you want to read it, here's a link to the ad on the Hobby Lobby web site. But wait... there's a better way to read Hobby Lobby's paean to theocracy.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has put together a way-cool annotated version. You click on a quote in the Hobby Lobby ad, then you can read the quotation in its original form and context.

Often it turns out that Hobby Lobby has purposely mangled the quotation to make it better fit their Christian theocratic world view. Many of the quotes are deliberately misleading, which shows how little respect Hobby Lobby has for truth-telling.

A letter to the editor in the Eugene Register Guard does a good job of critiquing the Hobby Lobby ad.

The Register-Guard’s full page “paid advertisement” from Hobby Lobby on July 1 offends me on several grounds. One, it’s right-wing evangelism masquerading as a 4th of July ad. Two, it says “A good America is a Christian America.” Three, it uses misleading, out-of-context quotes as evidence.

I have nothing against Christianity or Jesus. I love them both. But mixing Jesus with government is dangerous and misguided. God and Christianity trump the Constitution. This ad offers random quotes — endorsements — for God-and-Christianity by a few Founding Fathers and 18th and 19th century judges. What’s not there: The founders and Supreme Court vehemently disapprove of mixing church and state.

And here’s a tip for the R-G. Maybe try harder to discriminate between paid advertising and religious right recruitment? There’s even a clue in the bottom banner of the ad itself: “If you would like to know Jesus as Lord and Savior, visit Need Him Ministry ...” and “download a free Bible for your phone.” -- Michael Janover, Eugene

The opposite of the Empire of Reason is in reality the Empire of Faith. Hobbes calls it "the Kingdom of the Fairies"; in more modern terms, we could say that the opposite of democracy is theocracy.

----------

Thus, superstition permits individuals suffering from one set of passions to feed off individuals suffering from another according to a logic that neither side understands, and in this manner society lacerates itself in a fury of thoughtless self-destruction.

----------

No proposition could have elicited more support from the radical precursors to the American Revolution than that the priests are the chief instrument of tyrants.

----------

Human beings achieved self-government only after they learned how to discard the politically dangerous delusions that arise from the common religious consciousness. At least, that is more or less how America's founders saw the matter.

----------

The equality that Jefferson announced and that Lincoln partially advanced is at bottom the demand that all power must explain itself. In reality, the revolutionary force in the Declaration of Independence is the guiding principle of philosophy.

----------

Every thing in the universe strives to persist in being, say the radical philosophers, and the power of nature through which the human mind strives to persist is the power of the understanding.

----------

From the radical position that Locke and Spinoza share, it follows that religion is not a fundamental category of human experience for legal or political purposes in either its public or its private aspects.

----------

The separation of church and state that emerges from the early modern revolutions in philosophy and politics does not in fact imply that the modern secular state is or ought to be neutral with respect to religion in every sense of that term. Rather, this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion.

----------

This new public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief -- but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief. It also does not and ought not tolerate any attempt to shield the doctrines and practices of any religion from critical scrutiny.

Wheaton apologized to offended religious believers, but the points he was making really don't deserve an apology.

First, it is absolutely true that prayers are useless.

There's no evidence that praying changes anything in the absence of some physical action. The most scientifically rigorous study of prayer showed no effect on the recovery of people who had heart surgery (prayed-for people actually had more complications, not less).

As Wheaton said, the 26 people who were killed by Devin Patrick Kelley were sitting in a church. If they weren't praying at the exact moment Kelley began shooting, almost certainly they had been praying beforehand.

Yet politicians love to call for "thoughts and prayers" after every mass shooting. So do the anchors on cable news shows. It's a ritual that does more harm than good, as an atheist, Hemant Mehta, cogently argued in Prayer is Useless and Has a Downside.

While the main purpose of prayer may be to help others, it never demonstrably does that. Prayers benefit only those believers who say or hear them. Prayer gives them comfort. It lets them think they have some control over a situation that may be out of their hands. It’s the last resort of people who have run out of ideas, and the first resort of people who never bothered to think about how they could actually fix the problem at hand.

This is not harmless. There’s a very real downside to praying.

It lulls believers into a false sense of accomplishment. We cannot solve our problems – much less the world’s – through prayer. We often see people with good intentions praying for victims in the wake of a tragedy, but prayer is useless without action, and those actions make the prayers irrelevant. To paraphrase the great Robert Green Ingersoll, hands that help are far better than lips that pray.

I have no problem with “prayer” as an act of meditation. In fact, many atheists can tell you the benefit of silent self-reflection. The delusion occurs when you think someone else is hearing your thoughts and acting on them.

When it comes down to it, prayer is illogical, even in religious terms. If God has a plan, why try to thwart it? If God can be swayed by prayers, what kind of God would allow the horrors we see in the world? And if two devout believers pray for different things, how does God choose the winner? (I'm sure the San Antonio Spurs would love to know the answer to that.)

Prayer is nothing but a powerful placebo. We’d all be better off accepting that.

So Wheaton was completely justified in taking Paul Ryan to task for calling for prayers rather than some sort of action that would actually do something to stop more mass shootings. Here's some of what we know about the killer.

The US Air Force has said it is investigating its apparent failure to enter information about Texas shooter Devin Patrick Kelley's criminal history into the national database.

Ex-airman Kelly was court-martialled for domestic violence in 2012, and was barred from owning or buying guns.

But last year he was able to purchase a rifle he used in Sunday's attack on a small church outside San Antonio.

He killed 26 people and fled the scene. He was later found dead in his car.

The killer was able to buy an AR-15 assault rifle and other guns. He took 15 30-round magazines into the church and fired all of that ammunition at the people sitting in pews, along with the assistant pastor giving the sermon.

I don't believe in God.

Those who do have to come to grips with the fact that being in a house of worship and offering up prayers didn't prevent 26 people from being killed. Given that fact, how could anyone conclude that more praying is going to do anything to help those at risk of a future mass shooting?

Wil Wheaton's tweet may have been politically incorrect, but it also was politically right-on as regards the reality of gun violence in this country. The reason we have more gun deaths than other advanced countries is because we have more guns and we fail to regulate them properly.

“Thoughts and prayers” are fine. Locking arms “through the tears and the sadness,” as President Trump prescribed, is all well and good. But none of this does a damn thing to stop, or even slow, the carnage.

...Why did he do it? We may never be certain; the assailant, 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley, is dead. But we can say with certainty how he did such an unspeakable thing: with a gun designed for warfare, a weapon that has no business in civilian hands.

...The United States is alone among advanced countries in having gun policies that facilitate, rather than obstruct, deadly rampages such as Kelley’s. The Supreme Court has made clear in its rulings that the Second Amendment permits reasonable gun-control measures. This crisis is political, not constitutional.

You and I have the power to elect leaders who will reduce gun violence. The blood of innocents is on our hands.

October 09, 2017

The United States is a Fantasyland. And not just any old Fantasyland -- people in this country probably have the most fantastical beliefs of any country in the world.

This is the core message of Kurt Andersen's marvelous book, "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History." It's more that 400 pages, but if you want a short overview, check out an Atlantic piece, "How America Lost Its Mind."

I've only read the first part of the book. But already it's offered up fresh insights into a familiar topic on this blog, the ridiculousness of giving subjective religious beliefs way more credibility than they deserve by politicians.

“Except in the narrowest circumstances, no one should be forced to choose between living out his or her faith and complying with the law,” Sessions wrote. “Therefore, to the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law, religious observance and practice should be accommodated in all government activity, including employment, contracting, and programming.”

WTF?!

It's totally absurd for the Attorney General to say that "no one should be forced to choose between living out his or her faith and complying with the law."

As I've noted before, why should only religious faith get a free pass from United States laws?

Frequently people who drink a lot have faith that they can drive just fine. Shouldn't they be absolved from a ticket or jail time if they're caught driving drunk? What difference is there between a Holy Church of Drink All You Want Because God Loves This and another church that believes it is OK to discriminate against gays?

The above-linked article says:

“This guidance is designed to do one thing—create a license to discriminate against the LGBTQ community and others, sanctioned by the federal government and paid for by taxpayers,” Vanita Gupta, who led the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration, said in a statement. Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, accused Trump of furthering a “cynical and hateful agenda” and said the memo “will enable systematic, government-wide discrimination that will have a devastating impact on LGBTQ people and their families.”

Here's some quotes from Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland that shed light on how the United States became such a wacked-out country, a nation that elevates unfounded personal beliefs above reasoned, factual, evidence-based conclusions.

It's really sad that we've come to the place where our Attorney General says it is absolutely fine to discriminate against someone if you have a religious belief that is OK to do this. Again, why is religious belief elevated above other sorts of beliefs? As Andersen notes below, the root of our current Fantasyland lies in Protestant beliefs from the 1500s.

But many branches have grown from this root. Like the Attorney General's memo. Andersen writes:

Why are we like this?

That's what this book will explore. The short answer is because we're Americans, because being American means we can believe any damn thing we want, that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else's, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause and effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.

...In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

...Out of the new Protestant religion, a new photo-American attitude emerged during the 1500s. Millions of ordinary people decided that they, each of them, had the right to decide what was true or untrue, regardless of what fancy experts said. And furthermore, they believed, passionate fantastical belief was the key to everything. The footings for Fantasyland had been cast.

...As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: if I think it's true, no matter why or how I think it's true, then it's true, and nobody can tell me otherwise.

That's the real life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.

Another week, another mass shooting in America. At least 14 dead, another 14 wounded. And what are we going to do it about it?

Mostly offer our "thoughts and prayers" to the victims. And their families And the first responders.

Which, obviously, does precisely zero, nada, zilch to stop the next mass shooting. And it will come soon. Because the next one always does.

Only in America do we have this much gun violence. Why? Because we have way more guns per capita than any other nation. So we have way more gun deaths.

Responsible gun control is the answer.

Thoughts and prayers are useless. They accomplish nothing (if a person directly affected by a shooting is told you are personally thinking of them, then they might feel a little bit better, but this rarely happens).

So, please Americans, stop with the thoughts and prayers.

All these rote expressions of sympathy accomplish is relieve your guilt that you're not doing anything to stop the needless gun violence.

Instead, ACT!

Look, I understand the urge to pray after something horrible happens. I used to be a religious believer. I've done a lot of praying myself.

Now, though, I realize that (1) almost certainly God doesn't exist, so there is nobody to pray to, and (2) even if God somehow does exist, this is the same God who oversees the cosmos where the bad thing that stimulated the praying happened, so the God being prayed to is the God who allowed the horrific act to occur.

So when I see photos like this one of Democratic House members (also part of a baseball team) praying for their Republican colleagues, I think: I don't blame them for praying to their imaginary God, because they don't know any better; but if they think their praying is accomplishing anything, they're dangerously deluded.

Why do I say "dangerously deluded" rather than just "deluded"?

Because these people, being part of Congress, have a special ability to actually do something to prevent future mass shootings. In my 2015 post I laid out part of what I think needs to happens -- stronger gun control laws.

However, I realize that opinions differ about how to deal with the fact that the United States has way more gun deaths than any other advanced country (we also have way more guns). So I'm fine with lawmakers doing something other than what I want them to do.

I just want them to do something.

Unfortunately, it's a good bet that after a few days, or maybe a week, of "thoughts and prayers," this mass shooting will fade out of peoples' memory. Then another one will happen, and the thoughts and prayers will start up again, with no actual action having been taken in the interim.

This is the danger of believing in thoughts and prayers. Religiously-minded people feel that they've done something by thinking and praying, while in reality they have done nothing.

Sure, most Americans believe in prayer. This doesn't mean prayer accomplishes anything. No study has ever demonstrated the efficacy of prayer. Which isn't surprising, given that there is no demonstrable evidence for a God who responds to prayers.

So as an atheist, I look upon displays of prayer in this country much as someone would look upon a "primitive" hunter-gatherer tribe dancing around a fire, singing and chanting appeals to their nature spirits to bring rain. These are supernatural myths that are an integral part of most cultures.

Problem is, insofar as "thought and prayers" draw energy and attention away from viable actions to deal with a problem, these delusions are harmful to a society -- even though they may bring some peace of mind to individuals.

Obviously my blogging power doesn't extend very far, because thoughts and prayers are still as prevalent now as they were in 2013. But at least I don't believe that simply thinking or praying accomplishes anything.

Writing a blog post is taking some concrete action. Here's part of what I said in that post:

After the bombing I came across a Twitter Tweet by someone I follow, "scriptdave" here in Salem. He's a screenwriter with a great sense of humor. Also, some wise observations. He tweeted:

I respect the need people have to pray. But that prayer is meaningless unless you get off your knees and do something.

To which I Twitter-replied, "Amen." Later someone else commented on scriptdave's tweet. He told them:

I hear you. People need to reflect, meditate, process tragedy. But prayer being the end all is ludicrous. Do something real.

February 02, 2017

There are lots of reasons to dislike what President Trump (I hate writing those two words) is doing to our country. He's out to wreck the environment, trash human rights, destroy our relations with international allies, further enrich the already wealthy, and make women into second-class citizens.

But now there's another big reason to Resist The Idiot: news that Trump is out to make our constitutional democracy into a Christian theocracy.

President Trump vowed Thursday to overturn a law restricting political speech by tax-exempt churches, a potentially huge victory for the religious right and a gesture to his political base.

Mr. Trump said his administration would “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches from engaging in political activity at the risk of losing their tax-exempt status.

Repealing the law would require approval by Congress. Certain tax-exempt organizations — in this case, churches — are not allowed to openly endorse or campaign for political candidates. If they do, under existing law, they risk losing the benefits of their tax-exempt status.

So basically Trump wants to turn churches into PACs, Political Action Committees. People still would be able to claim donations they put in a collection plate as a charitable contribution, but then a church could use that money to try to get certain political candidates elected.

It's bad enough that the IRS hasn't been enforcing the ban on political speech from the pulpit. Now Trump wants churches to be able to spend money on political campaigns, which is totally against the intent and purpose of why certain organizations get designated as non-profit.

To be tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, an organization must be organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3), and none of its earnings may inure to any private shareholder or individual. In addition, it may not be an action organization, i.e., it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.

Look, I'm all for free speech.

But if churches and other religious groups want to speak freely about political issues, and financially support political candidates, then they need to give up their tax-exempt non-profit status. It's wrong for them to get the IRS benefits given to groups that serve a broad community purpose, and then use money donated to them for narrow political ends.

The draft order seeks to create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity, and it seeks to curtail women’s access to contraception and abortion through the Affordable Care Act.

...The breadth of the draft order, which legal experts described as “sweeping” and “staggering,” may exceed the authority of the executive branch if enacted. It also, by extending some of its protections to one particular set of religious beliefs, would risk violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

“This executive order would appear to require agencies to provide extensive exemptions from a staggering number of federal laws—without regard to whether such laws substantially burden religious exercise,” said Marty Lederman, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and an expert on church-state separation and religious freedom.

Well, as I've blogged about many times, it's crazy to allow anyone to be exempt from federal laws just because they have a religious belief that is at odds with a law. (See here, here, here, and here.)

A belief is a belief. It shouldn't matter whether someone's subjective belief rests on a religious foundation, or on some other foundation. Either beliefs are irrelevant to whether a law needs to be obeyed, or beliefs allow us to claim an "opt-out" from any law we choose -- in which case laws are pretty much ineffectual.

Let's say that someone has a firmly held belief that getting drunk and driving at high speeds is a deep religious experience that demonstrates their faith in God's ability to protect the faithful, sort of like when true believers handle poisonous snakes, or forego medical treatment.

Should this person be able to tell a police officer, "You can't arrest me because I was acting in accord with my religious belief." This would be absurd, right?

So how is any less absurd that someone should be able to fire an employee who is gay, transgender, or found out to have had an abortion? Is it OK for a business to be able to discriminate against people because the owner has some weird religious belief? How is this different from an individual discriminating simply because they hate gays, blacks, jews, or whoever?

It seems clear that Trump and his wacko band of supporters are determined to make the United States into a right-wing theocracy, like a Christian Taliban.

The Constitution should make this impossible, but given Republican control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, Trump has the ability to go a long way toward fulfilling his theocratic fantasy through Supreme Court appointments, rewriting of laws, and so on.

So we must resist. With all our strength. Because the United States is too wonderful a country to lose to a bigoted, hate-filled idiot.

December 07, 2016

It's easy to see what happens in life. It's much more difficult to comprehend why something happens.

For example, we know that Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. But why this occurred -- beyond the obvious "Trump got more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton" -- is a question that can't be definitively answered.

This doesn't stop people from theorizing, though.

At one extreme, a religious believer might say It was God's will. Or phrased more generally, This was fated to be. At another extreme, a nihilistically-minded person could opine, Shit just happens; end of story.

A book I've been reading, "The Simplest Case Scenario: How the Universe May Be Very Different from What We Think It Is," contains a metaphor that strikes me as an appealing middle ground between extreme determinism and extreme randomness.

Karl Coryat, the author, argues persuasively that the universe is composed of information rather than matter/energy. I'll write about his intriguing interpretation of modern science after I've finished his book, which should be in a few days. I'm looking forward to posting a highly positive Amazon review.

Coryat uses a Plinko Board analogy to convey how the universe, or by implication any part of it, could take many potential pathways -- but ends up taking only one.

The Price is Right game show uses a Plinko Board. Here's a video showing it in action. (I've made the video start at the point a contestant does the Plinko thing.)

Coryat explains how a Plinko board, or box, works.

If you drop a chip into a Plinko box, the chip may take any of a number of paths to the bottom. Whenever the chip falls between two pegs, it hits a peg underneath and must "decide" whether to go left or right. In this manner, each row of pegs that the chip encounters is like a coin toss, where we would expect the chip to go to the left or right with equal probability. Stated another way, it's as if the chip is presented with a series of yes-or-no questions, and the chip chooses an answer every time, effectively at random.

So this makes it sound like life is a crap game. You throw your dice and random luck makes things happen. However, in a footnote Coryat deepens our understanding of what is going on when a chip is dropped into a Plinko board.

Technically, the falling chip is exhibiting chaotic behavior. Rather than its path being determined strictly by the laws of probability, the path depends upon the precise way it was dropped, as well as minute factors such as air currents, dust, the exact shape of the chip, unevenness of the pegs, etc.

Still, the path is sufficiently unpredictable and unreproducible, and the outcome closely enough simulates probability laws, that we can think of the chip's path as being determined by probability. (The same is true of a well-performed coin flip or dice-roll.)

Chaotic behavior is deterministic. But the factors causing the behavior are so complicated, or so subtle, or so difficult to discern, for all practical purposes the ultimate reasons why something happens remain hidden in a chaotic shroud.

The butterfly effect is the concept that small causes can have large effects. Initially, it was used with weather prediction but later the term became a metaphor used in and out of science. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

The name, coined by Edward Lorenz for the effect which had been known long before, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a hurricane (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier.

Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.

I find a lot of comfort in these notions: Plinko box, chaos theory, butterfly effect.

Now, I admit that in my true-believing days I also found comfort in a belief that karma determined what happened in life, and that it was possible to escape karma's clutches by raising one's consciousness to a higher supernatural level through meditation and the grace of a guru.

(Yeah, I know that sounds weird, but so is every false religious belief. In addition, much of modern science sounds decidedly weird, even though it is true. So weirdness is found almost everywhere one looks.)

Thus in my previous state of mind, I would have thought, "Donald Trump won the presidency because this was meant to be."

Not believing this anymore, yet not being willing to accept that randomness rules the universe, I'm attracted to the logical, scientific, reasonable notion that determinism controls what happens in life -- yet usually not in obvious ways.

Mostly we like to look for Big Reasons that explain Big Events. Like, the winning of a presidential election. Or more personally, why we ended up married to a certain person, living in a certain place, having a certain career, and such.

So political commentators obsess over election results, exit polls, demographics, campaign strategies, etc., etc. There's nothing wrong with this. However, there's good reason to suppose that a presidential election is more akin to a Plinko box than we might like to think.

What if a staffer had said something at a certain time that made Clinton decide to not set up a personal email server for her Secretary of State work? What if Attorney General Lynch had the thought, "I shouldn't let Bill Clinton onto my plane," which would have made it much more possible for her to overrule FBI Director Comey's decision to publicly reveal a further investigation into Clinton's emails just before the election?

Many what if's of this sort can be visualized. A few tiny influences could have had a giant impact on the election, per the butterfly effect. In fact, almost certainly they did. It's just impossible to figure out what they were.

The course of real life events can't be observed like the falling chip in a Plinko box. All we know is the final outcome, not the convoluted chain of often-chaotic causes and effects that led to this rather than that happening.

Like I said, I find this comforting.

I don't enjoy the thought that Trump's victory was destined. Nor do I embrace the notion that it is possible to know why he won, and Clinton lost, because this would mean that if the Clinton campaign had been smarter, they would have come out on top on election day. Which leads to a sense of blame. And neither do I believe that there is no reason Trump won.

But in between It was meant to be and Shit happens is Sometimes life takes strange turns. Why? Impossible to say. Just like it is impossible to say why a single chip falling in a Plinko box ends up where it does.

In the days since November 9, an oppressive cloak of fear and dread has descended upon a great many Americans.

...This fear is not trivial and it may not be easily subdued. Fear is a biological response we’ve evolved to protect ourselves from threat, and it originates in the limbic system of the brain, the primitive reptile inside us.

Neuroscience tells us that uncertainty inflates our estimates of threat. So it’s not surprising that the uncertainty of what will come to pass in a Trump administration is leading many people to flirt with all-consuming, paralyzing panic.

...We’ve got 62 days until Trump takes office, so it seems like a good time to seek out the world’s oldest psychological teachings on transforming oppressive fear into something more productive.

...One of the most fundamental Buddhist teachings is mindfulness — the act of bringing awareness to the present moment. I spoke to Brother Phap Dung, a senior monk and teacher at Plum Village, the Buddhist community founded by the Zen master and author Thich Nhat Hanh, about bringing mindfulness to bear on fear.

“We see the mind like a house, so if your house is on fire, you need to take care of the fire, not to go look for the person that made the fire,” Dung says. “Take care of those emotions first, because anything that comes from a place of fear and anxiety and anger will only make the fire worse. Come back and find a place of calm and peace to cool the flame of emotion down.”

The simplest way to calm the mind is with the basic meditation practice of sitting quietly, focusing on the breath.

...“Unskillful fear … has got such a good argument: which is, anything can happen in the next moment.” A President Trump raises a multitude of deeply troubling possibilities of harm in the future, and while “that seems like a really convincing argument to keep on worrying and being afraid,” it’s actually not a good reason to remain gripped by fear in the present. We can’t know the future, and so allowing fear to hold us prisoner in the present is ultimately unskillful.

Skillful fear is watching it, getting really close to it, and uncovering the purer feelings, like love, underneath it. We can use fear skillfully by redirecting its energy and our attention toward more wholesome virtues, like courage and kindness, Lesage explains. “We must build dikes of courage to hold back the floods of fear,” Martin Luther King Jr. said.

On a more practical level, Brother Phap Dung recommends that people stop reading the news if it feeds fear. “Go take refuge in nature, and find a cause where your heart doesn’t feel inactive and in despair,” he says. “This is the medicine.”

As wise as this advice is, everybody will have a different way of dealing with negative emotions stirred up by the presidential election.

Personally, I find a lot of comfort in reminding myself that "I" don't really exist -- at least, not in the way most of us feel ourselves to be. Namely, an independent free-willing self who continually faces choices about what to do, and is responsible for the actions that we either decide to undertake or forego.

This feeling places a huge unnecessary burden on us. Unnecessary, because both ancient Buddhism/Taoism and modern neuroscience say that the self is an illusion.

Most people believe in free will, even though 21st century neuroscience strongly argues against its existence. We feel like there is a "me," a "self," that floats around independently inside our head, somehow disconnected from the goings-on of the physical brain and able to make decisions unaffected by prior experiences or external influences.

...People today still struggle with the same question: if I'm part of the world, why does the world so often seem to be at odds with me?

...Something is making everything be what is is, and do what it does. That something can't be separate from nature, unless we embrace some sort of nonsensical dualism. So why not call it the Way?

...The human mind can experience the world more clearly, or less clearly. We all know this to be true. Some days our mind seems to be in such frantic motion that it can't discern what is happening in the ever-moving outside world. Becoming calmer, more centered, helps us gain a clearer perspective. If I read or watch too much political news, I get information overload. Relaxing, I realize that there isn't any sort of objective presidential election reality. How things appear in our pre-election day perspective depends on what enters our minds, and how we look upon it.

...When I'm impelled to be politically active, to care about the presidential election, to help a chosen candidate, I need to realize that it is the World, the Way, that's bringing this about. Sure, I may feel like I'm making choices to donate money, vote a certain way, and such, but this is illusion. I, along with everybody else, am just a small cog in the Great Machinery of the Cosmos. My doing ultimately doesn't come from me, it comes from everything.

...Almost certainly, either Trump or Clinton is going to be elected president in a few days, an Electoral College tie being very unlikely. To deny the November 9 result is to deny reality. To believe "this wasn't supposed to happen" is to embrace an utterly crazy worldview, one which posits a schism between the what should be mind of the believer and the what is of existence.

I, like you, am part of the Way, the Tao, that also can be called Nature or the Laws of Nature. There isn't us and the world, or us and the presidential election. We're all in this together. We're all producing this together. We're all responsible for what happens together.

November 14, 2016

Like a lot of people, I was shocked last Tuesday when, instead of the Hillary Clinton win that I expected, I went to bed with the nightmare of a President Trump coursing through my still-awake brain.

It took me a long time to fall asleep. I did my best to relax, to reassure myself that this wasn't the end of the world. But damn, it sure felt like it.

During the past post-election week, I've been exploring mental defusing approaches to keep my head from exploding.

They seem to be helping, though it's difficult to separate the healing that comes from the simple passage of time and relief provided by the three philosophical approaches described below.

Your results may differ, of course, because you and I are different people.

I'm a godless scientific-minded materialist. So "Trump's election is part of God's plan" doesn't do anything for me, while it may for you. However, my first philosophical approach has some similarities to this sentiment. Minus God and plan.

It's my favorite, so I'll describe it in more detail than the other two approaches.

(1) Determinism rules the world. And, elections. I'm a big non-believer in free will. (Type "free will" in the Google search box in the right sidebar to find my many posts on this subject.) There's just no evidence that anything other than deterministic laws of nature are responsible for why things turn out the way they do.

It's easy to accept this when it comes to events involving entities that aren't alive, such as earthquakes. When a town is devastated by the ground shifting underneath it, nobody blames the earth for doing something wrong.

Likewise, if a lion attacks someone in an African jungle, the animal isn't viewed as blameworthy. At least, not in the sense of "it could have acted otherwise." Lions do what they do because that's their nature. But most of us view human beings differently.

We have this strange idea that Homo sapiens is a species that isn't governed by the deterministic laws that everything else in the universe, living and non-living alike, must follow. The reason: evolution has given us a sense of being an ethereal free-floating consciousness that is able to freely choose what the mind and body do.

Almost certainly, this is an illusion, one that has benefits, yet also drawbacks.

Just as a wrongly-held belief in free will makes us judgmental toward criminals (vindictive punishment isn't scientifically justified in a deterministic world, while controlling their behavior and rehabilitation is), so does it make us think "Donald Trump wouldn't have been elected president if only... ."

Clinton hadn't wanted her own email server. Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic nominee. FBI Director Comey hadn't released his letter soon before the election. Etc. Etc.

There's no such thing as "if only" in a deterministic world. Only one thing can happen at a time. Then another thing happens. And a following thing. There is no reality where anything happened differently than what actually occurred.

I find this comforting. This is why I enjoy dispassionate fact-based analysis of 2016 election results, as described in a recent post on my other blog.

As weird as Trump is, his winning the White House wasn't a random unexplainable bolt of electoral lightning. Like everything else in life, it was the result of causes and effects, some of which can be understood by us humans, and some of which elude our current ability to make sense of political reality.

I don't like what happened on November 8. But then, I don't like a lot of things that happen in the world.

Having Dover remind me that everything happens for various reasons, including presidential victories, helped me view the reality of President Trump as simply one more explainable undesirable event -- like an epidemic, earthquake, or economic downturn.

Now, I want to be clear: believing in determinism doesn't mean that one is fatalistic. Rather, just the opposite. Earthquakes and lion attacks have to be fought, resisted, dealt with, anticipated. But our reactions to determined events also are determined. (As is someone writing a blog post about determinism, and other people reading it.)

The advantage of a deterministic point of view is that energy isn't wasted in non-productive negative feelings of "this shouldn't be happening."

A skilled boxer doesn't worry about the punch that didn't land, or his opponent's blow that did. He uses that information in deciding what to do next. Focusing on a non-existent might have been distracts from bringing about the potential actuality of what can be.

(2) There is no objective right or wrong, good or bad. Related to my strong belief in determinism is a conviction that nowhere in the universe does an objectively real entity known as "right," "wrong," "good," or "bad" exist.

These labels are applied to things, people, events, and such by subjective human beings. They don't possess any reality outside of the human mind. Which doesn't mean they are unimportant judgments; deciding what is right or wrong, good or bad is an inescapable part of being human.

Our makeup is such that, in contrast to animals, we continually draw abstract conclusions from concrete happenings.

An earthquake isn't only that. It gets adjectives: devastating, horrific, terrifying. Similarly, the election of Donald Trump isn't only that. It gets the same sort of adjectives from people who were opposed to him: frightening, disastrous, dangerous.

I try to keep in mind that about half of the electorate was pleased, if not overjoyed, by Trump's victory. At the same time, about half was saddened, if not seriously depressed. Was one of these reactions correct, in tune with objective reality, commensurate with the way the world really is?

No. Both were subjective. The only objective truth is: Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States.

(3) Expanding our perspective alters our point of view. Obviously. Yes, it is possible to see the universe in a grain of sand. Still, there is a difference between the universe and a grain of sand.

Recent research conducted by an international team led by Christopher Conselice, an astrophysics professor at the University of Nottingham, found that the universe has about 2 trillion galaxies, which is 10 times more than previous estimates.

Two trillion galaxies. Not two hundred billion, which is still a heck of a lot. Two trillion. Each containing on average maybe 100 billion stars.

I feel very, very small. Not insignificant. Just small.

Understand: it is vitally important that we protect the livability of our one and only planet Earth. All those other galaxies, all those other stars with all those other planets, they don't do us a bit of good, because we're stuck with our galaxy, our star, our planet.

Still, I enjoy having my mind blown by the thought of those 2 trillion galaxies. It doesn't change the reality of what just happened in the 2016 presidential election. But it damn sure gives me a different perspective on it.

November 03, 2016

November 8 can't come soon enough for most of us. The presidential election campaigning feels like it has been going on for years. Because, really, it has.

We're stressed out.

Whether someone is a Clinton fan, a Trump supporter, a third party embracer, or a "none of the above" advocate, this 2016 election has gotten most Americans into a frazzled state of mind.

Me definitely included.

I obsess over the latest poll results. I worry whether I've done enough to help my favored candidate win the White House. I fret about what will happen to this country after the election is over.

So I thanked Tao for a feeling this morning that led me to walk over to my bookcase and pick up a book that I'd read years ago: Ray Grigg's "The Tao of Zen." (I see that Amazon has used hardback copies priced at one cent, plus shipping; this is a marvelous book, and that's an astounding bargain.)

Below I've shared the first 2 1/3 pages.

Griggs does a pretty damn brilliant job of encapsulating a lot of philosophy in just a few paragraphs. I was tempted to write "Chinese philosophy," but the problem of how we deal with the tension between what is and what will be (plus what we want being to be) is universal.

I felt much better after reading what Griggs wrote. He gave me a fresh perspective on how it is possible for me to be actively involved with politics without going any crazier than I already am.

My thoughts on these passages are shared in green below, interspersed with Griggs' words.

As the consciousness of the early Chinese moved from superstitious defensiveness to volitional empowerment, what Arthur Waley refers to as the evolution from a "pre-moral" to a "moral" culture, people began to realize that direct action was more effective than religious ritual in influencing events.

Well, duh. This seems obvious to me now. But since I embraced a form of Eastern/Indian religiosity for over thirty years, where a daily ritualistic meditation practice was required of devotees, I understand the appeal of ritual.

In early China this option of personal assertion as a response to unfolding circumstances first appeared in The Book of Changes, the I Ching.

I bought a copy back in my college days, 1966-71. We'd throw coins, as I recall, to find out what advice the I Ching had for us.

Its essential subject was the interplay between a constantly changing world and a self-conscious individual who was seeking options within these shifting circumstances. How was such a person to act within perpetual change and uncertainty, between what is and what will be?

This. Is. The. Big. Question. Right now we're getting lots of news about what's happening with the presidential election. But on November 9 we'll wake up to what actually did happen. The countless changing circumstances leading up to November 8 will produce a singular outcome: a President Clinton or a President Trump.

The obvious answer was to anticipate the changes by attempting to read the movement of circumstances, and then change them, avoid them, or be prepared for them.

Long ago, this was the job of the I Ching. Now we've got pollsters, analyzers like FiveThirtyEight, prognosticators, talking heads on cable news. More: everybody on Facebook has opinions, with supposed facts to back them up. We're addicted to trying to figure out what is going to happen before it happens, and what we need to do before there is a need to do it.

For a culture closely connected to the soil and the rhythms of the seasons, the Chinese became aware that all changes were linked to the ordered change of natural processes. Changes were not random or meaningless; they were bound by the character of the world itself and could be read in the images of rhythms of Nature.

A very scientific attitude in a pre-scientific world.

Human nature was part of Nature. Together the two rose and fell in patterns and cycles of growth and decay, birth and death. The similarities between inner and outer movement were noticeable and clear.

The ancient Chinese were ahead of their time. There's a good reason why The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters were written. Chinese philosophy is largely in accord with the basic principles of modern naturalistic science.

The I Ching measured these movements so they could be harmonized with each other. But it also measured something else. The insight that defined individual volition became the first conscious separation between inner self and outer circumstances. The spiritual integrity of all being was consequently divided, and the magical wholeness of a solely religious existence was fractured by the effort to control events directly.

Well, we're still fractured. Most people believe in free will, even though 21st century neuroscience strongly argues against its existence. We feel like there is a "me," a "self," that floats around independently inside our head, somehow disconnected from the goings-on of the physical brain and able to make decisions unaffected by prior experiences or external influences.

Attention shifted from passive ritual toward active influence. Although The Book of Changes recorded and then described this newly emerging relationship between the inner and the outer, it did not offer a resolution to the resulting split that now divided the sense of spiritual oneness.

People today still struggle with the same question: if I'm part of the world, why does the world so often seem to be at odds with me?

A more sophisticated thinking was required to resolve this dichotomy. In the structure of the I Ching and within its underlying assumptions was the resolution.

Now we start to get to why I'm so attracted to Taoism, and enjoy my Tai Chi practice so much (Tai Chi basically is Taoism in motion).

The condition that evolved from the I Ching held that two interactive elements influenced events. The first was the great force of circumstances, the universal principle that pervaded everything. This omnipresence was soft and nurturing but it was also hard and unfailing, both an energy of creative generosity and an inflexibility of order that was determined by the integrity of itself.

Poetic words that seem absolutely scientifically correct. The laws of nature can't be altered. Even when we think we're doing something unnatural, our ability to do that is part of what nature allows. Yet the natural world also is extremely appealing: beautiful, alluring, seductive.

Although immediate and obvious, this principle was also beyond thought and knowing. Because it was beyond words it was simply called the Way, the Tao.

Something is making everything be what is is, and do what it does. That something can't be separate from nature, unless we embrace some sort of nonsensical dualism. So why not call it the Way?

The second element was the virtue-power of individual character, the Te. It could be reached through tso-wang, "sitting with blank mind," by finding "the mind within the mind, or hsin tsung, the still place in the center of consciousness that was somehow connected to the Tao through the oneness of the inner and the outer -- a relationship somewhat like the Atman to the Brahman in Hinduism.

OK, this does sound sort of woo-woo. But I look upon what Griggs is saying here simply as a recognition that the human mind can experience the world more clearly, or less clearly. We all know this to be true. Some days our mind seems to be in such frantic motion that it can't discern what is happening in the ever-moving outside world. Becoming calmer, more centered, helps us gain a clearer perspective. If I read or watch too much political news, I get information overload. Relaxing, I realize that there isn't any sort of objective presidential election reality. How things appear in our pre-election day perspective depends on what enters our minds, and how we look upon it.

When this connection was entered, when the Te became one with the Tao, the result was a synchronistic accord between the inner person and the outer world. Thus people could live harmoniously within the bounds of natural order by becoming one with it.

Far out! Make me feel like I'm one with everything. Then there won't be so much of a Me that gets pissed at what Not-Me is up to.

They could be joint partners in the unfolding of circumstances, exerting their influence by taking part in the larger ordering process while remaining compliant to the larger ordering principle. Individual volition could become soft and cooperative, compliant rather than willful.

Wise advice. When I'm impelled to be politically active, to care about the presidential election, to help a chosen candidate, I need to realize that it is the World, the Way, that's bringing this about. Sure, I may feel like I'm making choices to donate money, vote a certain way, and such, but this is illusion. I, along with everybody else, am just a small cog in the Great Machinery of the Cosmos. My doing ultimately doesn't come from me, it comes from everything.

By cultivating inner character, people could influence events but still be in accord with the great order of the Tao. Thus the inner-outer dichotomy was resolved. This school of thought and practice became known as Taoism.

Like the saying goes, it is what it is. Dude. (see here and here) This isn't a bumper sticker slogan. It's the truest thing that can be said.

Almost certainly, either Trump or Clinton is going to be elected president in a few days, an Electoral College tie being very unlikely. To deny the November 9 result is to deny reality. To believe "this wasn't supposed to happen" is to embrace an utterly crazy worldview, one which posits a schism between the what should be mind of the believer and the what is of existence.

I, like you, am part of the Way, the Tao, that also can be called Nature or the Laws of Nature. There isn't us and the world, or us and the presidential election. We're all in this together. We're all producing this together. We're all responsible for what happens together.

...Taoism is the resolution of the subject-object, active-passive paradox that was invented by self-conscious deliberation. It puts together the wholeness that personal willfulness took apart. In simplest terms this is done by entering the dichotomy and becoming the empty stillness in the center of the paradox.

October 02, 2016

I used to think that I knew what it meant to be "spiritual." Now, I don't. (See here and here.)

But whatever the word means, I'm pretty damn sure that Donald Trump doesn't have any sort of genuine spirituality -- unless we twist the definition of that term to include incessant lying, habitual displays of egotism, and insults directed at minorities, women, political opponents, and anybody else who incurs the Wrath of Trump.

The spiritual life of the Republican nominee has been something of a mystery this election season. Trump describes himself as a Presbyterian, a “Sunday church person,” and he has been known to bring his childhood Bible to rallies. But his religious expressions have often been uncertain. He publicly doubted whether he deserves evangelicals’ support, claimed he has never sought forgiveness from a higher power, and muffed a Bible citation, quoting “Two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians.”

But Trump’s relationship with White isn’t an overnight conversion; it’s born of a longer courtship. The two friends met in 2002, after he watched White deliver a televised sermon on the value of vision. A longtime fan of televangelists David Jeremiah, Jimmy Swaggart, and Billy Graham, he cold-called White to introduce himself. Later he asked if she would attend the first season finale of his reality show, The Apprentice. Before the live taping, she prayed for the cast and crew.

OK, naturally I don't believe that prayer does anything, since almost certainly there is no God or other higher power able to hear prayers. But Pastor White's conception of prayer is even weirder than than of most Christians.

Eric Trump is not the only member of his family who has come to rely on White, 50, a popular televangelist who believes that intercessory prayer can have an immediate impact on shaping events. After she saw Eric, she went to her room in the Trump campaign’s Cleveland hotel, where she spent the next four hours praying for Donald Trump as he prepared for his prime-time convention address. Then at the candidate’s invitation, she met the Republican nominee, his wife Melania and 10-year old son Barron for another circle of prayer in their room.

“I do remember asking God to give him his words and his mind, and to use him—that it would not be his words but God’s words, that he would just really be sensitive to the Holy Spirit,” White recalled in an interview with TIME weeks later. “I probably [interceded] against any plot or plan or weapon of the enemy to interfere with the plan or the will of God.” That evening, White rode in Trump’s car with his family to the arena.

Plot or plan or weapon of the enemy? What the #@$%? White must be referring to THE DEVIL. Unless she means Hillary Clinton, who many Republicans view as one and the same.

Paula White

Wondering what causes Trump to be so attracted to Pastor White (aside from the obvious), I had the bright idea of Googling "Pastor Paula White prosperity gospel."

And yes indeed'y, up popped a bunch of references to her peculiar take on Christianity. Like a Washington Post story, "How the prosperity gospel explains Donald Trump's popularity with Christian voters."

The key bulwark of faith-based Trumpism is the prosperity gospel — a movement rooted in Pentecostal preaching that holds that God directly dispenses divine favor in the capitalist marketplace to his steadfast believers. Trump assiduously courted the leading lights of the prosperity faith well before his presidential run got serious enough for him to make the obligatory rounds at hard-line evangelical gatherings, such as last month’s Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference.

August 18, 2016

It's a pleasure to share a churchless opinion piece by my wife, Laurel. It was published yesterday in our town's alternative paper, Salem Weekly.

Laurel was impelled to write this after going into the belly of the beast -- attending a large Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham) religious rally at the state capitol grounds here in Salem.

Government shouldn't be guided by irrational conceptsby Laurel Hines

Recently evangelist Franklin Graham visited Salem to urge Christians to vote their “Christian values.” But does basing government on religious beliefs supported by a book written in pre-modern times make sense?

The Bible condones slavery and raiding other tribes, killing their children, raping their women. The Bible contains no modern knowledge about disease, the universe, or the world. Instead, it is based on the culture and knowledge of those who wrote it long ago. Further, Bible stories were re-told and re-translated many times.

None of the miraculous claims in the Bible holdup to modern scientific or anthropological scrutiny. Noah’s Ark is just one example.

Wouldn’t it be better to vote for policies that make sense for a modern world, based on critical thinking and current scientific knowledge, founded on evidence and not mere hopeful or fear-based religious belief?

Most Americans think Muslims are archaic for wanting to use Sharia law based on the Koran in governmental policies. But isn’t basing law on Christian beliefs the same?

Just because many people share a belief, doesn’t make it true. Most once wrongly believed that the earth was flat and the center of the universe.

Shared religious belief often causes clouding of critical thinking and over-stimulation of emotional brain centers. People grasp onto faith-based tenets of a religion while ignoring the fact that these aren’t based on any demonstrable evidence.

Some think religion is needed for morals, but why do predominantly atheist countries have the lowest crime rates (Japan, for example), and many mostly non-believing countries have the highest happiness index?

As a mental health therapist, I helped people examine irrational thinking patterns that moved them to anger, resentment, fears, anxiety, and depression. I helped them think more critically about wrongly-held assumptions that made no rational sense and impaired their functioning.

We all hold onto irrational beliefs at some time. Most of us believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy as children. Luckily, we evolved into critical thinking about those beliefs, but usually fail to examine the religious ones we are programmed to accept and taught not to doubt.

Our country was established as a secular nation, not a theocracy. There is supposed to be separation of church and state. Critical thinking, reason, humane treatment of all, and the greater good are better guides on how to vote than religious belief.

So I ask the Christians who flocked to hear Franklin Graham:

Do you think critically for yourself or blindly accept how your religious leaders tell you to vote?Certainty in one’s morals and beliefs can lead to problems in societies; doubt can be healthy and promote wise consideration of alternative understandings.

Perhaps judging less, learning more, and voting based on critical thinking, fairness, science, and reason would lead to a better government and society.

Do you allow yourself to doubt parts of your religious beliefs that seem absurd, or do you have a thinking blind spot when it comes to your chosen faith?

Laurel Hines is the leader of a growing group of Freethinking Atheists in Salem.

Three per cent of Americans say that they are atheists—which means that there are more atheists than Jews in the United States. An additional four per cent declare themselves agnostic; as George Smith noted in his classic book “Atheism: The Case Against God,” agnostics are, for practical purposes, atheists, since they cannot declare that they believe in a divine creator. Even so, not a single candidate for major political office or Supreme Court Justice has “come out” declaring his or her non-belief.

From a judicial perspective, an atheist Justice would be an asset. In controversial cases about same-sex marriage, say, or access to abortion or birth control, he or she would be less likely to get mired in religion-based moral quandaries.

...the appointment of an atheist Justice would send a meaningful message: it would affirm that legal arguments are secular, and that they are based on a secular document, the Constitution, which was written during the founding of a secular democracy.

In his book, "Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World," David Silverman speaks about the hypocrisy of people who profess a belief in God, but don't act in accord with their supposed beliefs. This makes them atheists for all practical purposes.

Silverman notes several examples of political figures who engage in "lying, coveting, and adultery -- all commandments being broken over and over," then writes:

It may be distasteful, but we must admit it -- these pandering hypocrites in Congress (and in churches) who talk as if they believe in a god but act as if they don't'are probably atheists, lying about their beliefs for their personal benefit.

In this world, there are good theists and bad theists, and there are good atheists and bad atheists, but some of the worst atheists, the ones who feign peity for personal gain, are running religion and politics.

Also, the United States Supreme Court. A Mother Jones piece about what Antonin Scalia said about homosexuality starts off with this.

Justice Antonin Scalia has written that "it is our moral heritage that one should not hate any human being or class of human beings." Judging by the things he has said in court or written in his legal opinions about gays and lesbians, he doesn't really mean it.

So likely Scalia was a closeted atheist, maybe even to himself. (People can lie to themselves just as persuasively as they lie to others.)

Might as well replace him with an atheist committed to secular fairness and reason, then. That person would have a higher standard of morality than Scalia, guaranteed.

January 05, 2016

Case in point: Ammon Bundy is one of the militants who have taken over buildings at the federal Malheur Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon.

Here's a short 90-second excerpt from a longer video Bundy made where he talks about what led him to try to help Dwight and Steven Hammond, ranchers in Harney County who were convicted on arson charges when they burned rangeland illegally -- endangering hunters and firefighters.

Somehow Bundy believes that when he needed to clear his mind about what to do, it was the Lord who did this for him. (Me, I've found a nap and coffee work just fine without God.)

Bundy also says that with his mind all clear, he understood how the Lord felt about the Hammonds. And the Lord wasn't pleased about how they'd been treated by government prosecutors, a jury, and the courts.

Now, ordinarily if someone claims that an Invisible Friend left messages in their mind to do this-and-that, we'd be inclined to think that's crazy.

But if a religious person asserts that God is the Invisible Friend, a cloak of cultural OK'ness protects them from most criticism.

Except from secular skeptics like me.

I'm 99.99% sure that the voice Ammon Bundy heard in his head came from him, not God. Hey, I've got mental voices speaking to me all the time, as we all do. But since they sound just like me, and almost always are in tune with the way I see the world, I correctly conclude that my urge to do something emanates from moi.

Which is both psychologically true and socially beneficial.

Because what Bundy says in this video isn't far removed from how Islamic terrorists and other fundamentalist extremists see reality. They also believe that God is impelling them to engage in certain acts.

Granted, so far Ammon Bundy and his band of Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupiers haven't harmed anyone. However, they're armed. And previously the Bundy family was the centerpiece of an faceoff between federal officials and militants that came dangerously close to a shooting war.

"The Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds," Bundy said in the video. "If we allowed the Hammonds to continue to be punished, there would be accountability."

Bundy and his brothers were among hundreds who protested Saturday on behalf of the Hammonds and later led a group of about 20 to take over an office at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

One militant interviewed by Oregon Public Broadcasting only identifies himself as Captain Moroni, a historic general who, according to church scripture, threatened to "stir up insurrections" and fight "until those who have desires to usurp power and authority shall become extinct" because he felt the government did not care about the country's freedom.

"I do not fear your power nor your authority, but it is my God whom I fear," Moroni said in the Book of Alma, "and it is according to his commandments that I do take my sword to defend the cause of my country."

That name is not a silly response to deflect responsibility: In many ways, it encapsulates a deeply intertwined anti-federal sentiment mixed with Mormon symbolism. Captain Moroni is a crucial figure in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He’s also a heroic figure for anti-federalist extremists.

In the modern day west, Captain Moroni has become one of several powerful symbols for the Bundy militia’s anti-governmental extremism.

After Ammon Bundy called on militants to join him in Oregon, the OPB story says: "The man identifying as Captain Moroni said he was inspired by the call, and that the inspiration was validated by God in the form of a flock of geese he saw flying."

Well, I live near the Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge in western Oregon. I see geese flying overhead all the time. Yet I've never used this as a reason to claim God wants me to do something.

Members of a feminist protest group known for storming events topless has disrupted an Islamic conference in France and caught what appears to be a bit of a beating in the process.

...Even right-wing media sites like Breitbart were impressed when two young women, sans shirts, took the stage last weekend at what was billed as a “Muslim salon” in Pontoise, France, a town just outside of Paris. The salon, as Buzzfeed reported, included a conversation about “Women’s valuation in Islam.”

In dramatic video that’s not exactly safe for work, the women take the lectern and start shouting in French: “Nobody enslaves me, nobody owns me, I’m my own prophet.” Messages written on their chests — a Femen trademark — offered similar messages.

“The two activists (both coming from Muslim families) [gave voice to] hundreds of women, feminists, and associations, all disgusted by this public hate speeches,” the group wrote on Facebook. “It was our duty to interrupt this enslavement event, and to let a scream of freedom be heard in the middle of their submission lessons.”

The women were quickly escorted offstage. But the escorting seemed to turn into a scuffle as a number of men began kicking the women once they were down.

August 20, 2015

Below is an essay that I wrote for the Spiritual Naturalist Society (I'm a contributing writer), but which struck them as too political for their tastes -- politics and policy-making apparently not being part of what they consider to be a "spiritual practice."

So, boo-hoo, it was rejected for their site.

I'm going to present some arguments to the Spiritual Naturalist Society folks about why no bounds should be placed around a naturalistic worldview. If there is no supernatural realm, it doesn't make sense to me to consider some aspects of a naturalistic person's life to be spiritual, and some aspects non-spiritual.

I meditate every morning. I go for a walk in nature every day. I do Tai Chi almost every day.

If these activities are "spiritual," then why isn't writing elected officials to advocate for some policy position, such as signing the deal with Iran or doing more to avert global climate change, or testifying at a city council meeting?

And also, fighting the interjection of faith-based supernatural religious beliefs into public policy debates, which, as you'll read below, was a big part of what our nation's revolutionary deistically-inclined founders strongly held to be true and good.

There’s no place for supernatural religious beliefs in discussions of public policy.

So, please, believers, leave out all mentions of God, soul, spirit, divine will, and such when you want to weigh in on abortion, embryonic stem cell research, LBGTQ rights, or other morally-fraught issues.

Being a political activist, my Christian friends (whether liberal or conservative) recoil when I speak like this. They feel it is fine to express their religious views in debates about how government should deal with matters of public policy.

I disagree.

After reading Matthew Stewart’s marvelously written and researched book, “Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic,” I’ve got fresh argumentative ammunition to bolster my long-held contention that religious views founded on supernaturalism shouldn’t be brought into the public sphere.

The founders of our nation intended the United States to be an Empire of Reason. Stewart writes:

Human beings achieved self-government only after they learned how to discard the politically dangerous delusions that arise from the common religious consciousness. At least, that is more or less how America’s founders saw the matter.

…The cultivation of the sciences and the development of culture and the arts become not just the route to advancing the other interests of the state but the end of the state itself.

The enlightenment of the people becomes their own true religion, while the shell of tradition vanishes into empty symbols of the life of individual and collective self-realization.

True piety in a reasonable world is the pursuit of happiness through the improvement of the understanding. Call it the religion of freedom.

Stewart dives into some deep historical and philosophical waters in “Nature’s God.” Its 435 pages aren’t the easiest to read or summarize succinctly.

So here’s a couple of metaphors that, to me, do a good job of showing why Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, Thomas Young, and other leaders during revolutionary times worked so hard to make reason, not faith, the foundation of our nation’s governance.

Imagine that you’re part of a residents’ committee charged with managing the common property of a housing development. The group is looking at a grove of trees, some of which may need to be removed to restore views.

A member of the committee interrupts the discussion. “I’m not in favor of taking down any trees,” she says. “I believe there are tree sprites, invisible fairies, living in them. The sprites would be harmed if any tree was removed.”

How could you respond to that? You want to tell the woman, “What you’re saying is crazy,” but that would sound impolite.

So you reply with, “Well, you’re welcome to your beliefs, but this committee is responsible for doing what’s best for our community. We have to base our tree removal decisions on what everybody knows to be real, not on the supposed desires of supernatural tree sprites.”

This is closely akin to how many religious people approach the question of abortion.

They believe that an immaterial soul enters the embryo at the moment of conception, or soon thereafter. Other people look upon abortion as a secular matter, a decision to be reached between a woman and her doctor based on personal moral and health concerns.

Once fervently-held religious supernaturalism enters a public policy discussion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to engage in an open debate where reasoned arguments are put forth, factual evidence carefully considered, and a fairly-arrived at decision determined.

Consider this second metaphorical example.

A group is playing poker. A hand has been dealt. The cards have been played. Everything is on the table for examination. A player with four aces prepares to pull in the chips she has won. Until she hears…

“Stop. I won this hand. I’ve got a straight flush, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 of clubs.”“No, you don’t. We can all see your cards. You’ve got nothing.”“Ah, those aren’t my real cards. My real cards are invisible. Only I can see them — give me the chips I’ve won.”

Who would do that?

The game has been played fairly. The only cards that count are the physical ones handed out by the dealer. There are rules for deciding which combinations of cards win out over other combinations. If someone brings in supernatural invisible cards, this makes playing a fair game of poker impossible.

Though I’ve used simple examples of tree cutting and poker playing, the same principles were at the root of why the American Republic was founded as a naturalistic Empire of Reason rather than a supernatural Empire of Faith.

Here’s another passage from “Nature’s God” where Stewart speaks of how our nation’s founders viewed private and public religiosity.

The separation of church and state that emerges from the early modern revolutions in philosophy and politics does not in fact imply that the modern secular state is or ought to be neutral with respect to religion in every sense of that term. Rather, this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion.

This new public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief -- but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief. It also does not and ought not tolerate any attempt to shield the doctrines and practices of any religion from critical scrutiny.

…In short, the state may adopt as a part of its public religion only whatever may be safely dissolved back into reason.

In the context of the American Revolution, Stewart’s mention of a sovereign doesn't refer to a king, queen, president, parliament, or congress. Rather, it means the people of the newly formed United States.

Thus it is the power of the people that isn’t obliged to answer to any private religious belief.

If someone tries to interject a faith-based doctrine that isn’t answerable to reason into a public policy question, this is as inappropriate as someone arguing that a tree can’t be cut down because of supernatural sprites, or claiming to have won a hand of poker because of invisible cards.

Here’s a succinct explanation of what Stewart means by “public religion.” Basically, it is deism, which in his conception isn’t far removed from atheism, being a naturalistic view of the universe.

The popular deism or natural religion that America's revolutionaries hoped to promote was distinguished above all by its commitment to the defining value of the Empire of Reason: the improvement of the understanding.

Thus the goal of these radical nation-building philosophers wasn’t so much to exclude God from the American Republic, as to include all of reality. This is the only way genuine understanding of what is true and good can be achieved.

In keeping with the guiding principle, it [an immanent rather than transcendent view of morality] says that whatever moves us, like whatever moves anything in the infinite universe, must be explicable. So the good always comes with reasons for its goodness; those reasons must refer to those motives that we generically identify as pleasure and pain; and those reflections on the affections can always be the subject of further reflection, elaboration, and qualification.

Given the diversity of these United States, our Constitution — as serious as it is — reminds me of a joke that begins with “A Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist, Wiccan, Muslim, Taoist, and Rastafarian walk into a bar…”

Except, the bar is our nation. And there are many more types of citizens than the nine I mentioned. One could argue, as many types as there are individuals living in this country, since every person is unique.

What is the common ground on which we all can stand during our debates and discussions about what is best for us?

What evidence and facts can be brought into attempts to reason our way to some sort of consensus on complex controversial issues?

The answer to both questions is Nature and Nature’s Laws. Everybody lives in the same natural world. We all breathe the same air, drink the same water, walk on the same Earth, gaze into the same sky.

Yes, humans also hold a wide variety of ideas about what, if anything, might lie beyond the physicality of this universe.

But those hypothesized supernatural conceptions divide us, while the actuality of science, and the understanding that flows from reasoned consideration of what is known to be real — that unites us.

Such was the unparalleled vision of our nation’s founders. Near the end of his book, Matthew Stewart speaks of what remains for this vision to be fulfilled.

In our tolerant age, we like to say that everybody is entitled their own worldview, that every worldview comes with its own “narrative” of the history, and that all such narratives are created equal.

So, according to the wisdom of polite society today, it’s a matter of personal preference whether the modern world emerged out of humankind’s emancipation from the shackles of religious superstition or whether instead it sprang directly from the head of Zeus, or was delivered in the form of a bountiful continent to this or that group of sectarian zealots.

But the only choice we really have is whether to be conscious or to persist in destructive delusions. Of course, it remains just as fashionable now as it was in Jonathan Edward’s day to lament the nihilism that supposedly grips us when we shed the false certainty of ignorance, and to bemoan the doom that will surely befall us when we depart from the simple faith of our fathers.

But the fact remains that the common power of humanity — the capability for cooperative action that is really just another word for our moral well-being — was never greater than after we lost our religion.

…The founding of the American Republic did not bring freedom to the slaves. It did not give justice to Native Americans. It did nothing to liberate women. And it still hasn’t prevented malefactors of great wealth from twisting the political process to their advantage.

All of these struggles fell to subsequent generations, and the provisional victories obtained thus far have been the work of those who have understood in one way or another that the American Revolution remains an ongoing concern.

The main thing we can learn now from the persistence in modern America of supernatural religion and the reactionary nationalism with which it is so regularly accompanied is that there is still work to be done. For too long we have relied on silence to speak a certain truth. The noise tells us the time has come for some candor. It points to a piece of unfinished business of the American Revolution.

Stewart dives deep into historical and philosophical waters in the book's 435 pages. At times I wondered why he was paying so much attention to a certain subject. But by the end of "Nature's God" I understood, pretty much, how each chapter contributed to his literary goal.

Which, basically, was to dispel the myth of the United States being founded as a Christian nation. Or more broadly, as a religious nation. In truth, this country was founded as an Empire of Reason.

I've written several blog posts about the book, here, here, and here. As with my first post, mostly filled with quotations from "Nature's God," I've done the same in this post -- starting at the point in the book that I left off with in the first set of quotations.

Stewart is just a freaking brilliant author.

Like I said, his book takes some effort to understand. You have to fit together a bunch of historical and philosophical pieces to get a good glimpse of the picture that is the foundation of the American Revolution and our constitution.

Enjoy. Read slowly. Then consider reading the quotations over again. I've had to do this. Repeated readings sometimes are needed to really fathom what Stewart is getting at, for me at least.

All virtue, according to this line of thought, is a matter of pursuing one's genuine interest or self-realization. It supposes an awareness of oneself, and of every aspect of one's actual life, in the present. It is not far from what in the Buddhist tradition is called "mindfulness."

----------

More dramatically, Spinoza tells us that we do not desire or detest things because we judge them to be good or evil; we judge them good or evil because we desire or detest them.

----------

So the good always comes with reasons for its goodness; those reasons must refer to those motives that we generically identify as pleasure and pain; and those reflections on the affections can always be the subject of further reflection, elaboration, and qualification.

----------

A still deeper insight embodied in the radical conception is that our knowledge of good and evil, such as it is, cannot be replaced with a thoughtless calculation delivered by some moral theory on the basis of some fixed set of rules, for it must follow from our awareness of the interconnections of things in the universe as a whole, taken without limit.

----------

The radical philosophy at the origin of liberal modernity, then, is not properly speaking (or exclusively) a humanism. It is closer to a naturalism that might one day be expected to embrace all species, a planet, and perhaps the universe itself.

----------

Thus: to complete the logic: if vice turned out to be a condition of happiness, then presumably God would clamor to see us vicious.

----------

For good and evil are nothing but pleasure and pain insofar as we are conscious of them.

----------

If one were to rummage through the history of philosophy for the words that might express the moral wisdom at the core of American liberalism -- the knowledge that we realize ourselves individually and collectively not by bemoaning our depravity and abasing ourselves before inscrutable deities but through the improvement of the understanding that brings with it both pleasure and virtue -- it would be difficult to find a more apt phrase than the one Jefferson placed at the heart of the Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness.

----------

But today we don't really need to wonder what a society founded on the principles of atheism would look like. We just need to understand aright the history of the United States.

----------

Liberalism in its original form is not the elaboration of some common moral intuition, the articulation of an arbitrary creed or cultural formation, or a theory of justice. It is a theory of power. Its principal claim is that the source of human power and freedom is the understanding. It rests in an essential way on the same radical philosophy that begins with Nature's God and passes through nature's virtue.

----------

The radical political philosophy that guided the American Revolution, on the other hand, begins not with this common assertion of the moral equality of human beings but with an explicit denial of the premise concerning the natural inequality of human beings. Human equality begins in nature, it says, not in moral imperatives.

----------

The demand for equality among beings that are naturally equal is really just the demand that all power should explain itself. A justice that comes from nature is in essence a justice that comes with reasons and is therefore subject to explanation and revision. It is this insistence on explanation -- not any moralistic imperative to be nice to other people, nor the appeal to arbitrary and unreliable feelings of empathy arising out of the human breast -- that would make the Enlightenment such a revolutionary force in human history.

----------

The Empire of Reason, to be clear, does not contain or restrict nature but realizes it, and so it is also, by definition, the most powerful form of state. It maximizes the freedom or power of the individual, insofar as we understand freedom or power as rational self-determination (as opposed to the satisfaction of passions). But the rational self-determination or power of the individual, as we know from radical ethics, is in fact coextensive with the rational self-determination of the collective.

----------

The radical freedom of thought begins with the claim that the mind is not in fact free to affirm or deny ideas at will, but is rather constrained to follow the evidence and reasons presented to it. The mind achieves its freedom, according to this line of thought, by pursuing reasons and evidence toward a more perspicuous understanding of itself, its own body, and the world around it. The mind needs its ideas in the same sense that the body needs to appropriate pieces of the outside world in order to generate itself.

----------

Not grasping that power is nothing but the understanding itself, human beings naturally tend to anthropomorphize it. Power, they tend to think, always belongs to the kind of thing that has a proper name. So they confuse the political power of their own collective with that of the king or institution that happens to wield it, in the very same way that they confuse the collective power of all things in nature with that of a presiding deity, to which they give the name of God.

----------

The common ideas about things make it especially difficult to see how it is that the sovereign, as distinct from government, may be identified with the people.

----------

The most obvious general principle of democracy is that it finds one way or another to give all individuals an equal voice in public affairs.

----------

The common religious consciousness supposes that right belief alone is the foundation for right action, and so it concludes that good religion is the necessary foundation of good government... The radical philosophers, on the other hand, say that understanding, not belief, is the source of all morality, and that the reasonable state embodies this understanding in its laws.

----------

America's founders were functionally unanimous in their conviction that good government starts with human beings as they are -- mostly irrational and hence vicious -- and produces virtue by relying not on acts of conscience but on acts of law.

----------

Tyranny happens when a society turns against itself, with one part usurping the power of whole and applying it to the exploitation of the rest.

----------

The opposite of the Empire of Reason is in reality the Empire of Faith. Hobbes calls it "the Kingdom of the Fairies"; in more modern terms, we could say that the opposite of democracy is theocracy.

----------

Thus, superstition permits individuals suffering from one set of passions to feed off individuals suffering from another according to a logic that neither side understands, and in this manner society lacerates itself in a fury of thoughtless self-destruction.

----------

No proposition could have elicited more support from the radical precursors to the American Revolution than that the priests are the chief instrument of tyrants.

----------

Human beings achieved self-government only after they learned how to discard the politically dangerous delusions that arise from the common religious consciousness. At least, that is more or less how America's founders saw the matter.

----------

The equality that Jefferson announced and that Lincoln partially advanced is at bottom the demand that all power must explain itself. In reality, the revolutionary force in the Declaration of Independence is the guiding principle of philosophy.

----------

Every thing in the universe strives to persist in being, say the radical philosophers, and the power of nature through which the human mind strives to persist is the power of the understanding.

----------

From the radical position that Locke and Spinoza share, it follows that religion is not a fundamental category of human experience for legal or political purposes in either its public or its private aspects.

----------

The separation of church and state that emerges from the early modern revolutions in philosophy and politics does not in fact imply that the modern secular state is or ought to be neutral with respect to religion in every sense of that term. Rather, this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion.

----------

This new public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief -- but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief. It also does not and ought not tolerate any attempt to shield the doctrines and practices of any religion from critical scrutiny.

----------

In short, the state may adopt as a part of its public religion only whatever may be safely dissolved back into reason.

----------

The important point is that such false religion remains confined to the private sphere, as a purely inward matter, where it is rendered harmless by the same civil laws that forbid the state from attempting to interfere with it.

----------

It is precisely because they identify religion with its purely private or inward aspect that Jefferson and Madison insist that government can neither restrict nor impose it through an establishment of religion.

----------

It alerts us to the fact that behind the definition of religion as a purely private affair there stands another religion, or a sense of piety, and this object of this ur-religion, or true piety, is not any particular deity or doctrine but the pursuit of understanding itself.

----------

In short, they [the founders of this country] wanted to bestow upon America the blessings of popular deism, or that variety of religion that translates into lively metaphors and memorized rituals the radical and essentially atheistic philosophy on which the modern liberal state rests.

----------

Jefferson was certain that priestcraft and its paraphernalia of mystifying dogma would wither under the disinfecting light of the new empire of reason.

----------

The popular deism or natural religion that America's revolutionaries hoped to promote was distinguished above all by its commitment to the defining value of the Empire of Reason: the improvement of the understanding.

----------

It is only to the degree that religion is not what it once was, moreover, that we can and ought to tolerate it, and may hope to find in it some limited utility for modern society.

----------

America's mainstream religion is at bottom one form or another of popular deism, and popular deism is just atheism adapted to the limitations of the common understanding of things. To say that the United States is a "one nation under God" is to conceal behind a euphemism the fact that it is and always has been one nation under nature. Whatever else we pretend to believe, we are in practice mostly atheists now -- and for that we should be grateful.

----------

The best account of the spread of secularism remains the one that Jefferson first suggested: that it is the natural consequence of the freedom of thought in a free society. Not the orbits of the planets or the origin of the species but the daily movement of social, moral, and political experience in the modern world has made secularism inevitable.

----------

To attempt to explain the world today through the experience of the common religious consciousness is to live in a kind of moral chaos. It is to inhabit a house of fractured mirrors, where submission to inscrutable authorities counts as freedom, where that which is good for the health of the individual and the collective is called evil, and where all are expected to bear the lifelong burden of pretending to believe one thing while doing another.

----------

Once upon a time, it took a certain kind of genius to see that atheists could be virtuous. Today, only those blinded by bigotry can think otherwise. The revolutionaries of the early modern period needed their books to imagine a world free from the chains of the common religious consciousness. Today we need only our eyes.

----------

Ideas are acts of understanding. They derive their power from their truth, not their acceptance. They involve clearing away old delusions, not erecting new ones. They don't settle the future; they only make sense of the past. They are the ground of our freedom, not an instance of it. And the history of the past several hundred years shows that ideas in this sense did change the world.

-----------

Self-governance became possible -- however imperfectly -- only after radical philosophy cleared the field of those common misconceptions through which human beings participate in their own enslavement.

----------

But the fact remains that the common power of humanity -- the capability for cooperative action that is really just another word for our moral well-being -- was never greater than after we lost our religion.

----------

The main thing we can learn now from the persistence in modern America of supernatural religion and the reactionary nationalism with which it is so regularly accompanied is that there is still work to be done. For too long we have relied on silence to speak a certain truth. The noise tells us the time has come for some candor. It points to a piece of unfinished business of the American Revolution.

In my last post I shared a bunch of quotations from the book. Here I want to take a stab at relating what I've learned so far (I've still got about fifty pages to read) in my own words, without quoting from "Nature's God."

After all, when I finish the book the usable part of the contents will be in my mind. It is less important that I understand exactly what Stewart is arguing, as that I understand it in my own way. So here's my reasoned take on some core themes of "Nature's God."

People often say that many of the leaders of the American Revolution were deists, rather than theists. This is true. They didn't believe in a personal god who took a special interest in earthly affairs. Or any affairs within the universe.

Their god basically was synonymous with nature. Thus understanding the laws of nature was the best way to understand God.

Knowledge doesn't come from some transcendent source. It is immanent, not transcendent. Meaning, we humans have the means to know reality via our senses, reasoning, experimentation, observation, analysis, and all the other characteristics of the "scientific method," broadly speaking.

Morality also is immanent. As is knowing how to be happy.

If we act in accord with Nature's Laws, this is the deist equivalent of obeying transcendent commandments handed down by a god. Revelation is useless for gaining understanding or knowledge, because it isn't founded on reason, evidence, observable reality.

So our Declaration of Independence speaks of the "pursuit of happiness."

Government exists to express the will of the people as to the best way to regulate human affairs so as to make this pursuit most fruitful. Again, it is a matter of learning, of experimentation, of trying things and seeing how they work, then changing direction on the basis of new knowledge.

Because there isn't a god-given sense of what is right and wrong, of what produces more or less happiness, it takes effort to learn what works, and what doesn't -- on both a personal and societal level. Discussion, debate, criticism, questioning, these are essential both for individuals (like in our own head) and for associations of people (like cities, states, nations).

Ideally, everyone has an equal capacity and right to take part in the messy, yet valuable, democratic processes of electing people to represent them, and then critiquing their performance.

The differences between people are small in comparison to what makes us similar. Thus it doesn't make sense to restrict control of government to people of a certain gender, race, education, wealth, or whatever.

Everyone is capable of using his/her reasoning ability to argue for certain policies and choices. It is the quality of reasoning that matters, not the quality of someone's character, faith, religion, ancestry, or such. This is the "radical" side of the American Revolution that, of course, doesn't seem radical or revolutionary at all to most of us today.

It just did back in the late 1700s, when it was widely assumed that power should reside in royalty, church officials, landed gentry, white people, men, and other subsets of humanity.

Left to ourselves, following our instincts, we often screw things up.

Thus we need to carefully consider the wisdom of our actions both on an individual and societal level. "I will..." is just as vacuous as "Thou shalt..." unless what follows is backed up by solid evidence, careful reasoning, considered discussion.

The reason why Epicurus and those who followed in his philosophical footsteps advocated moderation in most things isn't because this sort of "Middle Way" reflects a transcendent moral or ethical law. Rather, it is just the way nature operates.

If we eat too much, we feel sick to our stomach. If we drink too much, we get a hangover. If we have sex with every willing attractive person we come across, we complicate our lives. So moderation in food, alcohol, and sexual relations isn't a matter of morality, it is the best way of being happy in the long term.

Similarly, when left to themselves people often over-indulge on a social level. We will be tempted to usurp others' property, possessions, money, and so on. Thus government exists as a necessary social conscience. Again, this requires commitment to a "learning culture," just as individual happiness does.

Since there is no God looking after us, and no moral rules other than the natural consequences of nature's laws, we humans have to feel our way along as best we can. Our guide isn't a transcendent revelation of "This is the way things are." Rather, it is a never-ending search for truth, wisdom, knowledge, reality.

There is no end to this search.

Choices between better and worse ways of acting always will confront us, both as individuals and as members of the body politic. If we have good reasons for doing this rather than that, and learn from the results of our actions, that's the best we can do.

Such was the vision of our country's founders.

Naturally Matthew Stewart expresses this much more clearly and completely in his book than I've been able to do in this blog post. But it was enjoyable to give it a reasoned try.

Sure, both statements are true. But only in a certain context. Here's some of what astrophysicist Tyson says about Scientology.

So, you have people who are certain that a man in a robe transforms a cracker into the literal body of Jesus saying that what goes on in Scientology is crazy?

...But why aren’t they a religion? What is it that makes them a religion and others are religions? If you attend a Seder, there’s an empty chair sitting right there and the door is unlocked because Elijah might walk in.

OK. These are educated people who do this. Now, some will say it’s ritual, some will say it could literally happen. But religions, if you analyze them, who is to say that one religion is rational and another isn’t? It looks like the older those thoughts have been around, the likelier it is to be declared a religion.

If you’ve been around 1,000 years you’re a religion, and if you’ve been around 100 years, you’re a cult. That’s how people want to divide the kingdom. Religions have edited themselves over the years to fit the times, so I’m not going to sit here and say Scientology is an illegitimate religion and other religions are legitimate religions. They’re all based on belief systems.

Look at Mormonism! There are ideas that are as space-exotic within Mormonism as there are within Scientology, and it’s more accepted because it’s a little older than Scientology is, so are we just more accepting of something that’s older?

Great points. It reminds me of the saying that an atheist is someone who tells believers, "I just deny one more God than you do."

Meaning, every major religion (and maybe also every minor one) teaches that it knows who/what the True God(s) is or are. Beliefs, rituals, and such based on that supposed knowledge make great good sense to the religion's followers, while the practices of other religions are looked upon as misguided, if not bizarre.

Next Sunday countless Christians will worship on Easter, which celebrates the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

That is really a very weird belief. Sure, to Christians it isn't, but that's because they take it to be true. To them the idea that the angel Gabriel verbally revealed the Quran to Muhammed over about 23 years, though... that is clearly absurd.

Well, in religion one person's ridiculous absurdity is another person's blessed faith. Thus there are lots of different religions, each appealing to different groups of people. Which seemingly is a lot like music -- there are many different genres, classical, rock, hip hop, rap, blues, jazz, etc. etc. -- except it really isn't.

Because few people who like a certain type of music also claim that this type is objectively better than other sorts of music, whereas religions typically make objective truth claims.

Religions are popular because they make people feel better. So does listening to music. But people don't get into actual music wars, with killing and such. Nor do they try to justify social policies and laws based on their music preferences.

Religious believers do, though. Why?

Because in order to feel good about their religion, most devotees need to believe that its teachings are true, even without any demonstrable evidence for this. After all, how comforting would the notion of heaven be, if it was viewed as a fictional place rather than as an actual afterlife destination?

Now, where the rubber hits the road is, since we are a free country where belief systems are constitutionally protected—provided they don’t infringe on the rights of others—then how do you have governance over “all” when you have belief systems for the “some”?

It seems to me that the way you govern people is you base governance on things that are objectively true; that are true regardless of your belief system, or no matter what the tenets are of your holy documents. And then they should base it on objective truths that apply to everyone.

So the issue comes about not that there are religious people in the world that have one view over another, it’s if you have one view or another based on faith and you want to legislate that in a way that affects everyone. That’s no longer a free democracy. That’s a country where the few who have a belief system that’s not based in objective reality want to control the behavior of everyone else.

...But the point here is that if you’re religious, and your religion tells you that being gay is bad, then don’t be gay. But you have to remind yourself that that’s your belief system, and there are other belief systems that don’t agree with that, so you should not be in the position to make legislation that affects other people.

Absolutely. Nicely said, Dr. Tyson.

However, I did have to pause and ponder the statement, "It seems to me that the way you govern people is you base governance on things that are objectively true." At first this seemed far distant from how legislators in this country actually govern, even when they govern well.

But the more I thought about it, it does seem that objective reality is indeed the basis for all legislation and executive action.

Laws and policies are intended to make a difference in the real world. So even though it isn't always obvious how "objectively true" is the touchstone for governing, it does seem to be, deep down.

For example, a few months ago the Oregon legislature considered a bill that would eliminate non-medical reasons for not immunizing children. I thought this was a good idea. Extensive research has show that immunizations are generally safe and effective, bringing many more health benefits than problems.

It shouldn't matter what people believe about immunizations; what counts are the objective facts about immunizations. These can be argued about and debated, but the goal is to learn what is objectively true.

Sure, personal values play a role in political discussions. These should be subservient to generally held facts, though. This was the theme of one of my first Church of the Churchless blog posts, "Religious values have no place in politics."

But I can’t think of any examples of opinions about political issues that are incapable of being founded on either proven or provable factual premises. Consider abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage—three issues that are commonly considered to comprise the core of “values-based” voting in the last election.

Opinions about each of these issues can, and should, be founded on objective facts derived from social science and medical science research. There are costs and benefits to various individuals and society as a whole from the presence or absence of abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage. These costs and benefits can be determined. They can be communicated. They can be discussed. They can be the basis for informed political decisions.

But you can’t determine, communicate, discuss, or decide anything on a religious or what-God-wants basis. The moral tenets of every religion are unproven and unprovable, using Volokh’s words. However, the moral tenets that flow out of political decisions founded on accurate real-world information can be proven, because the real world is provable.

For example, fetuses either feel pain or they don’t. If they do, then it should be possible to determine how much pain is experienced during an abortion. People could use this information to help decide when an abortion is justified and when it isn’t. Intelligent debates about the pros and cons of abortion could replace the frenzied moralistic “I’m right and you’re wrong!” screeching that now passes for political discourse in this country.

You can’t debate with someone who doesn’t have a defensible reason for why they believe what they do. You can’t debate with someone who responds to a reasoned argument with “Because the Bible says so” or “Jesus condemns sinners.”

Let's call it what it is. It's discrimination wrapped up in a legislative bow. It's divisiveness painted as something holy. It's tired and cynical politics weakly masked as a principled stand.

Sure, it is cleverly labeled with a market-tested name (the Religious Freedom bill), but please don't be fooled: This is nothing more than a government endorsement of discrimination. Yes, in this land of liberty, our state's government is prepared to push into law a measure allowing one group of people to tell others that they are not equal and not welcome at their businesses.

...Once again, Statehouse Republicans have found a way to divide our state. They've done so with a bill that will allow business owners to judge the morality of their potential customers and to decide whether those customers are worthy of spending their money in their shop, bakery, or whatever.

My goodness, can Indiana Republicans just get past an anger over gays and lesbians that borders on the obsessive? Apparently, they cannot. And, so, after losing their war over same-sex marriage last year, Statehouse Republicans have joined a national conservative effort to create a crisis that doesn't exist. Along the way, they are making clear that yesterday — or, to be more accurate, the last century — still controls today's Grand Old Party.

Some relatives on my wife's side live in Indiana. Being good-hearted people, naturally they're aghast at what bigoted Republicans in their state have wrought.

I enjoyed this Facebook post from one of them:

Since our wonderful Indiana state legislature has decided that it is ok to ignore laws if you disagree with them based on religion, I'd like to announce my religious beliefs. My religion forbids me from following posted speed limits signs, as they are an abomination. I am required to drive at whatever speed I feel in my heart is appropriate.

I'll announce other laws that my religious beliefs exempt me from as I come across them. Thanks.

Naturally I had to leave a comment on the post.

Excellent idea. I recommend making the unlimited use of alcohol and psychoactive drugs part of your religion also. Makes more sense than hating gays does, or whatever other religious craziness Indiana now allows.

Should people get a free pass to break whatever laws they want under the banner of religion? What prevents someone from forming the Church of Drunk Driving whose holy sacrament is tossing down a six-pack and then jumping in a car?

As already noted, "Religion" is just a name for a collection of unsubstantiated, nonfactual personal beliefs that are held by enough people to give them some sort of social acceptance.

If you hear an outside voice in your head telling you to do something, you'll be considered crazy. Unless you say that the voice is God --then you'll be revered as a religious devotee.

I don't see why religious beliefs should be treated any differently under the law as any other subjective individual belief. If we start allowing people to ignore laws they don't believe in, there will be no end to the law-breaking.

For me, the only positive aspect about Indiana granting businesses a license to discriminate is that it makes me feel good that I live in Oregon, where we're considerably more enlightened.

If you don’t believe in God, you might want to move to the Pacific Northwest.

Portland, Ore., is No. 1 on the list of metropolitan areas with the most religiously unaffiliated residents (42%), according to the nonpartisan and nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Atlas, a survey of 50,000 people. Seattle and San Francisco were tied at second place (with 33%) on the list, and Denver (32%) and Phoenix (26%) were third and fourth.

Indianapolis, predictably, was 19% religiously unaffiliated. And probably it is more open-minded than rural parts of Indiana. Some of our relatives live near Bloomington, though, which is a pretty cool university town.

January 04, 2014

Beliefs are not equal under the law. At least, not in the United States. Religious beliefs have an edge over non-religious beliefs, even when the believer holds the same belief.

Which is absurd.

By their nature, beliefs are a matter of opinion. Otherwise we'd call them "facts." Gravity is a fact. God is a belief.

Favoring insurance coverage for contraceptives (birth control pills and other means of preventing pregnancy) is a belief. It can be founded on facts as well as ethical principles. But in the end, it is a belief.

Most, if not all, governmental social policy decisions in this country come down to a matter of democratically elected public officials choosing one alternative over others -- again, based on beliefs (hopefully factually founded).

The Affordable Care Act mandates that contraception coverage be included in health insurance policies.

There are good reasons for doing this. Preventing unwanted pregnancies is the best way of reducing the number of abortions. Women should be able to choose if they want to become pregnant, rather than leaving this largely to reproductive chance.

Yet the Affordable Care Act carved out an exception for those organizations which have a religious objection to providing contraception coverage for employees.

This is ridiculous. Again, why should someone with a religious belief be able to ignore a law, while someone who holds the same belief for non-religious reasons has to abide by the law?

If a woman-hater believed that females should be barefoot, pregnant, and obedient to men, he couldn't use that misogynist belief as a basis for getting out of the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive coverage mandate.

But if a devout Catholic believes that females shouldn't be able to use contraceptives, our political and legal system says "You don't have follow the law like other people do."

Two beliefs, each at odds with a broad cultural consensus about what constitutes good social policy, yet only one gets to ignore the law.

I don't think religious believers should be able to get any special treatment under the law. However, since they do, the question at hand is whether requiring an order of Colorado nuns to sign a simple form saying they have a religious objection to contraception coverage puts an undue burden on them.

Of course not.

Probably The Little Sisters of the Poor doesn't have to file tax returns. If they did, they'd realize that if anything is an undue burden, it is complying with IRS requirements. For a religious organization, getting out of the Affordable Care Act's contraception coverage mandate is super-easy.

"They need only self-certify that they are a non-profit organization that hold themselves out as religious and have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, and then provide a copy of their self-certification to the third-party administrator of their self-insured group health plan," argued Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. in the government's filing.

But in a reply filed by the Little Sisters lead counsel Mark Rienzi late Friday, the nuns' attorney countered that the government is "simply blind to the religious exercise at issue" and that "minimizing someone's religious beliefs does not make them disappear."

That's right, unfortunately. I wish the absurd relgious beliefs of The Little Sisters of the Poor would disappear, particularly the ones that go against the grain of sound ethical social policy decisions.

This great Matt Wuerker cartoon shows how crazy it would be if someone's personal beliefs were able to determine what sort of health insurance coverage his or her employees could get.

Christian conservatives, for more than two decades a pivotal force in American politics, are grappling with Election Day results that repudiated their influence and suggested that the cultural tide — especially on gay issues — has shifted against them.

They are reeling not only from the loss of the presidency, but from what many of them see as a rejection of their agenda. They lost fights against same-sex marriage in all four states where it was on the ballot, and saw anti-abortion-rights Senate candidates defeated and two states vote to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

(Sadly, in the state where I live, Oregon, a citizen initiative that would have legalized marijuana failed to pass. But happily, Washington state passed marijuana legalization, including its sale in officially sanctioned stores. I'm predicting a tourism boom between Oregon and Washington.)

Back in 2004, after the Bush-Kerry presidential contest, I started this blog because I was so upset with how Christian fundamentalists had swayed the election in Bush's favor. They'd come out in droves to vote for hateful anti-gay marriage ballot measures in many states.

So it's hugely satisfying to learn that Americans are turning away from that sort of misguided religiosity. Once again, the Christian right put a lot of time, money, and effort into defeating candidates and initiatives that offended their rigid moral sensibilities.

Didn't work this time.

“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.

I'm proud of voters in Washington state. Along with legalizing marijuana, they defeated an initiative that would have overturned legislative approval of gay marriage. Until this election no state had endorsed gay marriage through a vote of the people.

But last Tuesday Maine, Maryland, and Washington did so. The times are a'changing, to quote Bob Dylan. It just has taken longer than us flower children types expected back in the '60s. The United States took a moralistic Christian turn for quite a while, which now is reversing according to the NY Times story.

The election results are just one indication of larger trends in American religion that Christian conservatives are still digesting, political analysts say. Americans who have no religious affiliation — pollsters call them the “nones” — are now about one-fifth of the population over all, according to a study released last month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The younger generation is even less religious: about one-third of Americans ages 18 to 22 say they are either atheists, agnostics or nothing in particular. Americans who are secular are far more likely to vote for liberal candidates and for same-sex marriage. Seventy percent of those who said they had no religion voted for Mr. Obama, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

Not surprising. However, what is surprising to me is how so many Republicans are supportive of policies that limit individual freedom.

This is a core contradiction in American conservatism: right-wingers want to keep government out of people's lives, except when it comes to who people can marry, what psychoactive substances they can ingest, whether women can choose to have a baby, and other decisions that libertarians seemingly should support -- but most Republicans don't.

My theory is that conservatives in this country have been infected with religion to a much greater extent than conservatives in other Western nations are. This disease weakens their commitment to individual liberty, because religions want control over people, believing that they alone know what pleases God.

And it isn't libertarian-style freedom.

So it is the secularists and other open-minded voters who adhere to values that should appeal to small-government Republicans: allowing people to marry whoever they want; to use marijuana if they want; to have an abortion if they want; to have access to insurance coverage for contraceptives if they want.

I've got some advice for the recently soundly-defeated Republican Party. You'd get much more support from a much larger proportion of the electorate if you remained conservative on economic issues, and became more liberal on social issues.

That's a formula which could work for you, given changing demographics. Relying on your traditional base, older white religious voters, is a recipe for continued electoral defeats. Loosen up on dogmatic morality and tighten up on deficit reduction, tax reform, and similar fiscal stuff.

November 06, 2012

Reality won tonight! I've been glued to my television, laptop, and iPhone for about six hours, sweating out the results of our national election.

Obama has been re-elected president. Democrats are going to maintain control of the Senate. Virtually every Republican I was hoping would lose, did.

I'm happy. Both for the political philosophy that I favor, and for the reality based community that I consider myself to be a proud member of.

Because this was more than an election between Republicans and Democrats. Borrowing a fancy term from a highly respected political analyst, Nate Silver, who I like a lot, this was a epistemological watershed.

The choice between Romney and Obama, along with the choice between Republicans and Democrats generally, indeed involves two ways of how we gain an understanding about reality -- the province of epistemology.

Nate Silver is a proud member of the knowledge/facts/science community.

So am I. So is Obama, by and large. Romney and most Republicans running for office at the national level are part of the feeling/fantasy/religion community.

Thus when ballots are counted tomorrow, voters not only will be electing candidates, they'll be choosing a worldview that will be a basis for guiding our country during the next four years. Or longer.

...I very much want Obama to win tomorrow. I also want Silver's epistemological perspective as shared on Five Thirty Eight to win. Which it will, if Obama gets an electoral college win close to the 315 (O) - 223 (R) split Silver is projecting.

That would be a giant Obama victory. And also a victory for the reality-based community.

Currently Obama has 285 electoral votes, according to the New York Times. If he wins Florida and Ohio, as seems likely, that'll add 47 to his total, making it at least 332. Pretty damn close to what Nate Silver predicted.

That's the power of reality, fueled by facts, evidence, reason, respect for truth. It's what science has, and religion lacks.

With great timing, it arrived in the mail today from Amazon. I like the title. Distinguishing between truth/the signal and falsity/the noise is central to both political polling analysis and understanding of what the cosmos is all about.

It's easy to miss reality's signal when our focus is on meaningless noise. Today voters in the United States rejected falsities offered up by Republican candidates. That's a win for reality. I hope this is a sign that the noise of religion will be similarly rejected by increasing numbers of Americans.

September 13, 2012

The recent killing of diplomats at the American consulate in Libya raises questions about the balance between freedom of speech and religious liberty.

This subject is dear to my heart, since I've been blogging on this here Church of the Churchless for eight years, attempting to do the same thing -- speak my mind about the ridiculousness of organized religiosity while respecting the personal beliefs of individuals (after all, we all believe in weird things; weird, that is, from the perspective of other people; to us, we're absolutely normal).

It's unclear what set off Muslims who attacked American diplomatic outposts in Libya and Egypt.

Part of the impetus clearly was an anti-Islam video put up on You Tube that trash-talks Muhammad. It's so infantile and poorly made, I'm not going to embed a viewer in this post like I usually do with You Tube videos. I managed to watch about five minutes before I got sick of the video and turned it off.

Before crowds attacked the embassy and consulate, but after rumblings of discontent had been heard in the "Arab street," the American embassy in Cairo issued a statement that got Mitt Romney in an unjustified uproar.

PolitiFact demonstrated that this wasn't an apology for the video, as Romney claimed. (How can someone apologize for something they had nothing to do with?) Still, Romney felt that it excused Islamic extremism and denigrated free speech. Here's what the embassy said.

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

Snap judgments aren't helpful here. There are some subtle distinctions to be thought about carefully in this statement. My first reaction was to disagree with the notion that the video was an unjustified abuse of free speech. If Muslims can't take criticism of their religion, that's their problem. Grow thicker skin.

But in the Romney campaign's talking points regarding whether it was appropriate for the embassy to condemn the You Tube video/movie, the response was "Governor Romney rejects the reported message of the movie. There is no room for religious hatred or intolerance."

I agree with this (one of the few times I've agreed with anything Romney says).

To me, Islam is an absurd religion. But so is every religion. None of them are worthy of being believed as objective fact, because there's no demonstrable evidence to support the tenets of any religious faith. Yet (and this is an important yet), most people on Earth believe in an unbelievable religion.

So what is a non-believer like me to do? Spend all of my time going up to the vast majority of my fellow humans and scream at them, "You're an idiot! You believe ridiculous religous crap!"? No, that doesn't feel like a good thing to do.

One reason is that I used to be one of those idiots myself. Another is that insulting people rarely makes them change their mind in the direction the insulter desires. Still another is self-interest: belligerently getting in someone's face can lead to your own being punched (figuratively or literally).

I heard this on a radio talk show yesterday: "Sure, you've got the right to tell your neighbor that his wife is dumb, fat, and ugly. But he's also got a right to sock you in the nose." Today our nation's top military leader recognized the same truth.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey called Florida pastor Terry Jones on Wednesday to ask him to withdraw his support for the video that some reports have linked with anti-American unrest in the Muslim world, a spokesman said.

“He called of his own initiative over concern that the violence incited by the film would pose risks to U.S. service members around the world,” said Marine Col. Dave Lapan.

The bottom line for me is this: I'm fine with people criticizing religious beliefs. However, I don't like it when these criticisms are hateful, overly emotional, insulting, denigrating, and aimed at hurting the feelings of believers.

Though I dislike organized religions, I've got no problem with individual religious beliefs.

Like I said before, we all believe things that are deeply personal, can't be proven as objective fact, and offer us comfort in this often-uncomfortable world. Life is tough. We all need someone or something to lean on.

This seems to be what the statement of the Egyptian embassy and Romney's campaign have in common. Me included, I guess. We respect the diversity of religious, spiritual, mystical, and philosophical beliefs in this country, and the world as a whole. We don't like it when haters venomously attack some belief system in a hateful manner, rather than reasonably.

"I don't agree with the premises of your religion" is a lot different than "You're a fool for believing what you do." Personal professions of faith shouldn't be attacked; collective claims that such-and-such is objectively true for everybody deserve rigorous critical debate.

I'd enjoy watching a You Tube video that dismantled in a reasonable fashion the tenets of Islam. But in my five minutes of watching I couldn't discern any coherent criticisms of Islam in the video that got some Muslims so righteously angry.

Of course, they might have gotten angry at reasonable criticisms also.

If so, my one-word response would be tough. Deal with it. On the whole, Muslims seem to be overly touchy about people criticizing their religion. There's no excuse for trashing the American consulate and killing four diplomats.

At the same time, I don't like trash-talking of personal religious beliefs either. Here on the Church of the Churchless I often say, "Whatever works for you, go for it. Just don't expect me, or anyone else, to agree with you."

September 06, 2012

Nice people are just that: nice. Good people are just that: good. Compassionate people are just that: compassionate.

There's no need to ascribe their niceness, goodness, or compassion to their religiosity, as Jack Roberts did in an opinion piece, "Romney's religion should be an asset, not a liability," in today's Portland Oregonian.

I say this as a non-Mormon who from my Mormon friends has gained a deep appreciation for the positive values that church imparts to its members -- chief among them their obligation to provide support and charity for others. I could never join that church myself because their beliefs are not my beliefs, but I am convinced that every community benefits by having more people with the personal qualities most of the Mormons I know exhibit.

Well, it's nice to know that the Mormons Jack Roberts is familiar with are nice, good, compassionate people. But if you read some of the comments on the Oregonian article, it'll be clear (and utterly non-surprising) that some Mormons are jerks.

Most of my friends and acquaintances are either atheists or non-Christians. They have lots of positive qualities. I can pretty much guarantee that they're as nice, good, and compassionate as any bunch of religious people.

But I would never claim that their non-belief in God is what makes them so kind and caring. It's irrelevant, really, just as Romney's religion should be when voters assess his qualifications to be president.

Roberts quotes from a South Park episode dealing with Mormonism. This is to his credit; thumbs-up to any opinion writer who is able to support his position with a South Park quote. However, I learned from a commenter on his piece that Roberts left out the end of what a Mormon boy said in the South Park episode.

Through the magic of Google, I was able to find the script of that show. Here's what the Mormon boy says, in full (I've italicized the part Roberts left out, for understandable editorial reasons).

Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life. and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don't care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that's stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you're so high and mighty you couldn't look past my religion and just be my friend back. You've got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls.

"Suck my balls" humanizes Gary, the Mormon boy. I found his mini-speech annoyingly sanctimonious up to that point. Those three words revealed him to be an appealingly flawed human, just like the rest of us.

Still, it's absurd to think that just because the Mormon church encourages its members to love their family, be nice, and help people, this is why Mormons do these things. Non-Mormons do those things also. Non-religious people do those things also.

All kinds of people all over the world love their family, are nice, and help people. Jack Roberts needs to realize this. By and large religion doesn't make people better, any more than playing golf, going to college, playing a musical instrument, or doing anything else makes people better.

Everything we experience in life, along with our genetic heritage, makes us who we are. Religion is one influence, but by no means the most important influence. Get to know all those nice, caring, compassionate atheists in your community, and you'll understand what I mean.

Jeez, I was beginning to think that the Democratic Party to which I belong really was a coven of atheistic religion-haters who got their kicks from burning the Bible while high on illicit drugs (that'd be a good thing, of course).

My hopefulness arose from reading that "God" had been dropped from the 2012 Democratic platform. The Christian Broadcast Network reported:

Guess what? God’s name has been removed from the Democratic National Committee platform.
This is the paragraph that was in the 2008 platform:

“We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.”

Now the words “God-given” have been removed. The paragraph has been restructured to say this:

“We gather to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth – the simple principle that in America, hard work should pay off, responsibility should be rewarded, and each one of us should be able to go as far as our talent and drive take us.”

I much prefer the godless paragraph. It sounds much more American to me. Hard work. Responsibility. Talent. Drive. Those words seem more in tune with our national ethos than "God-given potential."

God-given potential? Sounds like whatever we're born with, that's what we're stuck with, because God gave us what we have to work with, and nobody can argue with God.

Well, I watched video of the voice vote at the convention which needed a 2/3 majority to be approved, and it sure sounded to me like an equal number of delegates approved and disaprroved of God in the platform (plus Jerusalem being the capital of Israel).

Maybe in 2016 the Dems will hold firm on their godlessness. I'll start praying for that!

August 09, 2012

Ever since I started following the controversy over Harry Reid's claim that Mitt Romney didn't pay any taxes for ten years, I've had a feeling that deep philosophical issues relating to the validity of religious faith are involved.

Here's my attempt to explain why.

It's fascinating, really. Reid and Romney are both Mormons, which is a weird variety of Christianity. Or to some, Mormonism is an independently weird religion.

Regardless, Christians and Mormons believe in the Bible. The New Testament gospels were written by guys -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, John -- with no direct knowledge of Jesus. So what they said about Jesus' life and teachings is hearsay.

Just like Reid's claim about Romney failing to pay federal income taxes for a decade. He won't reveal his source. Attention is being focused on moderate Republican Jon Huntsman (a fellow Mormon and Reid supporter).

So Reid got information from somebody who supposedly knows what's in the tax returns.

Thus Reid's knowledge has pretty much the same ontological validity as the Gospels. Anonymous sources reported they know Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected. Likewise, an anonymous source reports he/she knows Romney's tax returns show no income tax paid for ten years.

To be consistent, shouldn't PolitiFact give every Christian politician who refers to Jesus and the New Testament a Pants on Fire rating? If faith in anonymous sources is an admirable trait in religious believers, what's wrong with Harry Reid having faith in whoever told him about Romney's tax returns?

There's no independent demonstrable evidence that Jesus is the Son of God, other than what is written in the Gospels by people who claimed to know other people with direct knowledge of Jesus. There's also no independent demonstrable evidence that Romney failed to pay income taxes for ten years, other than Reid's statement that he talked with someone with direct knowledge of Romney's tax returns.

PolitiFact shouldn't give a Pants on Fire rating, which amounts to "you lie!", when there isn't any demonstable evidence on either side of a claim. Reid says Romney didn't pay any taxes. Romney says he did.

Why should either Reid or Romney be believed without evidence? What basis is there for calling Reid a liar, and not Romney? Neither has brought forward any firm facts to back up their claims.

Ah, you might be thinking, but Romney does know what is in his tax returns, because he filed them.

Yes, that's true. But this is analogous to someone knowing what happened in Jesus' last days. Why should what they say be believed without confirming evidence? There are good reasons for them to make up stories about Jesus' resurrection and other miracles.

The big difference between Christianity's truth claims and Reid/Romney's truth claims is that evidence does exist for the latter: Romney's tax returns. Romney has said he doesn't want to release any more returns because the Obama campaign would use information in them against him.

Which is more reason to be as skeptical about Romney's "I did pay taxes" as Reid's "He didn't pay taxes." Without demonstrable evidence, both statements have to be accepted on faith, just like religious claims are.

This morning I saw that PolitiFact had put out a Twitter Tweet on this subject:

We're hearing suggestions to create a new Truth-O-Meter rating for something like "unsubstantiated." Let us know what you think.

l think it's an excellent idea.

At the moment neither Reid nor Romney can substantiate their claims about Romney's tax returns. So it's a draw.

Both should get an "unsubstantiated" on the issue of whether Romney paid income taxes for ten years. It's unfair to give Reid a Pants on Fire for saying he heard that he didn't, when all Romney has done is say that he did.

I'd also like to see PolitiFact rate faith-based statements by politicians which bear on social policy. For example, if a politician says that an embryo or fetus has a soul, assess the evidence for this. Is that statement true or false?

Most likely, it would be unsubstantiated.

Usually religious claims rest on supernatural assumptions which can neither be proven, nor definitively rejected. The probability is just very high that those claims are false, based on the lack of evidence which seemingly should be evident but isn't (like miracles, which somehow stopped happening with the advent of scientific ways of studying them).

Personally, what I find most probable about Romney's tax returns is that he did pay income taxes most years, but at an embarassingly low rate.

For that reason -- and others like Swiss bank accounts, IRA gimmicks, high-priced dressage horse expenses, and such -- Romney doesn't want the truth about his finances to come out. Similarly, if religious believers knew everything that goes on behind the scenes of their favorite faith, my bet is that the truth also would shock them.

May 13, 2012

There are lots of reasons for people in the United States to vote for President Obama rather than Mitt Romney in November. Romney's sucking up to evangelical Christians is just one reason -- but an important one.

In a recent speech at a hotbed of Christian'ist fundamentalism, Liberty University, Romney told the assembled believers in an imaginary God the untruths they wanted to hear.

In the same week that President Obama galvanized his base by endorsing same-sex marriage, Mr. Romney’s message was that evangelicals could count on him to operate as president under “a common worldview,” including his position that marriage should be between only a man and a woman.

...Repeatedly invoking God and citing an array of Christian leaders and thinkers, from Pope John Paul II to the novelist C. S. Lewis, Mr. Romney spoke of the centrality of family and service and the tradition from America’s beginnings of trusting “in God, not man.”

Only problem, and it's a big one, is that this country never has been a Christian nation. Our founding fathers (and mothers, I assume) were appropriately skeptical of the sort of dogmatism that Romney mistakenly considers to be part of this nation's early history.

Check out the quotes in "The 12 Best Reasons Why The U.S. Is Not Now, and Never Should Be, a Christian Nation." Here's a couple of my favorites:

3) “But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed.”–John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816

6) “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.” –Thomas Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt, 1813

7) “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.” –James Madison, letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774

10) “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” –James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance

Sam Harris' great little book, "Letter to a Christian Nation," offers up a blunt modern perspective about why Romney is so wrong.

There is, in fact, no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: the creator of the universe takes an interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell.

…An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse—and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.

February 26, 2012

I used to joke about the "American Taliban" -- fundamentalist Christians who say they want to make this country into a Bible-based theocracy.

But now that every Republican presidential candidate has endorsed this crazy notion in one form or another, it isn't nearly as funny to me. Losing our constitutionally-guaranteed right of freedom from religion is a serious matter.

And one worth fighting hard to prevent.

I've voted for Republicans in the past, and would consider doing so again if moderates of the sort we Oregonians used to elect came back into G.O.P. fashion. But nowadays Governor Tom McCall, Senator Bob Packwood, and Senator Mark Hatfield wouldn't have a chance in a Republican primary.

It's disturbing that Rick Santorum, who either has a national lead in the Republican presidential race or is close to Romney's polling percentage, has said that the United States should follow God's law, not secular laws.

Unlike Islam, where the higher law and the civil law are the same, in our case, we have civil laws. But our civil laws have to comport with the higher law. … As long as abortion is legal—at least according to the Supreme Court—legal in this country, we will never have rest, because that law does not comport with God’s law.

Santorum also has criticized President Obama for not aligning his policies with Christian theology. Hey, Rick, wake up! The President of the United States isn't supposed to do this, according to our constitution.

You and your fellow Republican theocrats are the ones who should be roundly chastized for ignoring our nation's history.

Columnist Joe Nocera notes that early on, Roger Williams and other like-minded believers fleeing from religious persecution wanted to insure that immigrants to America would be free to either believe in God, or not believe.

However, John Winthrop was the Rick Santorum of his day. He wanted America to be a theocentric state founded on strict Puritanism. Fortunately, the Williams ideal prevailed. Unfortunately, the 2012 Republican presidential candidates show strong signs of wanting to resurrect Winthrop's dream of an authoritarian Christian nation.

I don’t doubt that if Winthrop could see America today, he would be horrified — just as, in many ways, Santorum is. Americans are free to do things that Santorum — and Winthrop — would view as deeply sinful. Individuals can believe what they want and act as they wish, without caring about what Rick Santorum — or John Winthrop — thinks.

By the time Roger Williams was an old man, Quakers had largely taken over the political structure of Rhode Island. “Roger Williams despised the Quaker religion,” Barry writes. But he did nothing to prevent their ascent, because he believed so strongly that one’s religious beliefs should not matter in the affairs of state.

Unlike Winthrop, if Williams could see the America his central idea gave us, he would likely be pleased. We should all be.

February 18, 2012

Until I read Rich Lowry's column in the Oregonian today, I didn't realize how wacko the religiousy libertarian wing of the Republican Party had become.

Way wacko.

Following Lowry's logic about why Catholics with a moral distaste for contraception shouldn't have to comply with health insurance laws that apply to everybody else, apparently anybody with a moral objection to any law should be able to ignore it.

About a month ago, people who thought religious institutions shouldn’t be forced to pay for things they morally oppose were unremarkable, boring even. Now, they are waging a heinous War on Women.

Through the twisted logic of statism run amok, opposition to a new Health and Human Services mandate forcing employers to buy insurance covering contraceptives becomes opposition to access to contraceptives altogether.

...The Catholic bishops are merely fighting to keep institutions affiliated with their church from getting coerced into participating in what they consider a moral wrong.

Morality comes in many forms. Religious believers have a moral code. So do secular nonbelievers. Thus I assume Lowry wants government to stop coercing anyone "into participating in what they consider to be a moral wrong."

OK. Let's see how that'll work out.

Surely there are lots of alcoholics who love to both drink and drive. They don't feel like they're doing anything wrong. Their moral code says "Have a good time at a bar. Then get in your car. No problem." Why should drunk drivers not be able to do whatever they want, free of government interference, just like he wants to allow Catholics?

Here's a less extreme example: people who have a moral objection to financing unnecessary wars. Or even wars in general. Lowry seemingly wants every citizen who objects to the Department of Defense to subtract from their tax bill the percentage of the federal budget that goes to the military.

After all, nobody should have to participate in what they feel is a moral wrong. And no reasons need be given for a moral stand. Religions don't have demonstrable, factual, reasonable reasons for their "thou shalt's."

Blind faith and I believe suffice for religions. So why not for everybody else?

If you think it'd be ridiculously unworkable if people could decide what laws they wanted to comply with (I sure do), then the absurdity of allowing religious organizations to be exempt from the Affordable Care Act's health insurance coverage rules should be apparent.

But if Lowry and the Republicans get their way, I'll be founding my Church of Unlimited Speeding, Alcohol Consumption, and Pacificism.

Our sacred sacrament will be racing around superfast on the highways, drunk on whatever type of alcoholic beverage members of the congregation prefer, which has been paid for by all the money saved by deducting from our taxes the 20% or so of the federal budget that goes to defense and security.

February 09, 2012

A week after I wrote "Contraception should be covered by religious organizations," I'm still amazed that providing birth control benefits to women via a health insurance plan is controversial in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

This isn't the Dark Ages. The Catholic Church doesn't run the western world. Few people, and certainly not the United States Constitution, believe the Pope is infallible when he makes moral pronouncements.

So why should the Obama administration, or anyone else, take seriously the freak-out of religious fundamentalists over its decision to require faith-based organizations which employ members of the general public to cover a standard set of preventive services, including contraception, in their health insurance plans?

This already is required by 28 states. Lots of Catholic institutions already pay for birth control. Ninety-eight percent of Catholic women have used birth control, while only 2% use the ineffective rhythm method.

Contraceptive use by Catholics and Evangelicals—including those who attend religious services most frequently—is the norm, according to a new Guttmacher report. This finding confirms that policies making contraceptives more affordable and easier to use reflect the needs and desires of the vast majority of U.S. women and their partners, regardless of their religious beliefs.

“In real-life America, contraceptive use and strong religious beliefs are highly compatible,” says Rachel K. Jones, the report’s lead author. “Most sexually active women who do not want to become pregnant practice contraception, and most use highly effective methods like sterilization, the pill, or the IUD. This is true for Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants, and it is true for Catholics, despite the Catholic hierarchy’s strenuous opposition to contraception.”

It's an absurd controversy. The only reason it's being taken at all seriously is because a bunch of crazies have grouped together under a religious banner, which supposedly makes their craziness more credible.

Actually, it doesn't.

Being out of touch with reality is crazy whether one person or a million are doing it. There's nothing wrong with using birth control. In fact, there's a lot right with contraception. The Institute of Medicine has recommended that it be included among the preventive services available to women in the Affordable Care Act without deductibles or co-payments.

I don't know anyone who thinks using birth control is wrong. I bet even most religious people don't know anyone who thinks contraception is sinful. But the Pope does. As do the (male) leaders of the Catholic church.

Who cares? I sure don't.

People believe all kinds of weird things. Some religious crazies don't believe in blood transfusions. Others don't believe in using any sort of medical care. If I'm employed by an organization that serves the general public and gets government support, why should I be controlled by religious craziness that I don't believe in?

This new rule on contraceptive coverage is part of the health care reform law, which was designed to finally turn the United States into a country where everyone has basic health coverage. In a sane world, the government would be running the whole health care plan, the employers would be off the hook entirely and we would not be having this fight at all. But members of Congress — including many of the very same people who are howling and rending their garments over the bishops’ plight — deemed the current patchwork system untouchable.

The churches themselves don’t have to provide contraceptive coverage. Neither do organizations that are closely tied to a religion’s doctrinal mission. We are talking about places like hospitals and universities that rely heavily on government money and hire people from outside the faith.

We are arguing about whether women who do not agree with the church position, or who are often not even Catholic, should be denied health care coverage that everyone else gets because their employer has a religious objection to it. If so, what happens if an employer belongs to a religion that forbids certain types of blood transfusions? Or disapproves of any medical intervention to interfere with the working of God on the human body?

Organized religion thrives in this country, so the system we’ve worked out seems to be serving it pretty well. Religions don’t get to force their particular dogma on the larger public. The government, in return, protects the right of every religion to make its case heard.

February 03, 2012

And that's also how I look upon the freak-out that erupted after the Obama administration required religious organizations (colleges, hospitals, etc.) which serve the general public to cover contraception, just like others who offer health insurance are required to do.

Note: contraception. Not abortion. Birth control pills, condoms, IUD's. The Institute of Medicine recommended that birth control be fully covered under health plans.

But, you know, the Institute of Medicine used facts, evidence, research, and common sense in reaching that conclusion, which weirds out faith-based folks. Preventing unwanted pregnancies saves lives, reduces abortions, and enables women to space out births, among other benefits (some medical conditions also are treated with birth control pills).

During his lecture, Archbishop Dolan criticized people who postponed conception with “chemicals and latex,” calling them part of the “culture of death.”

Archbishop Dolan, you need to get out of the Dark Ages. Step into the light. And bring your 100% male Catholic leadership along with you. I have zero sympathy for religious crazies who fuss about being required to comply with laws that everyone else has to follow.

Well, make that almost zero.

Conscientious objectors to war, like Quakers, being able to perform some other service than fighting -- that makes sense to me. I'm also OK with doctors who are morally opposed to abortion not being required to perform that procedure.

But a religious institution offering birth control to employees and students of many different faiths who are covered by a health insurance plan is completely different. Nobody is being forced to use contraceptives who doesn't want to. Birth control simply is available at little or no cost to those who want to avail themselves of it.

A "religious conscience exemption" argument usually is a load of crap. Religious believers shouldn't be able to avoid laws just because they have a strongly held personal belief. Hey! We all have strongly held personal beliefs.

I haven't had a single bite of meat or fish since I became a vegetarian in 1970, forty-one years ago. I strongly believe in both the morality of not killing animals for food, and in the health benefits of vegetarianism.

But if a bunch of other vegetarians and me started a college which espoused our dietary beliefs, yet enrolled meat-eaters also, would it be fair if we required that anyone who got a student loan from the federal government couldn't buy a hamburger -- or any other animal flesh -- while they were associated with our college?

Most people would think that'd be ridiculous. But it's no more ridiculous than a Catholic hospital saying "We shouldn't have to provide our employees with birth control coverage under their health insurance plan."

Kevin Drum gets it right: "If You Take Taxpayer Money, You Have to Follow Taxpayer Rules."

I guess I'm tired of religious groups operating secular enterprises (hospitals, schools), hiring people of multiple faiths, serving the general public, taking taxpayer dollars — and then claiming that deeply held religious beliefs should exempt them from public policy. Contra Dionne, it's precisely religious pluralism that makes this impractical.

There are simply too many religions with too many religious beliefs to make this a reasonable approach. If we'd been talking about, say, an Islamic hospital insisting that its employees bind themselves to sharia law, I imagine the "religious community" in the United States would be a wee bit more understanding if the Obama administration refused to condone the practice.

December 10, 2011

Do people have free will? No. Is almost everything in the cosmos determined? Yes. Have humans evolved a core morality? Yes.

Put these facts together, and you arrive at a persuasive scientific argument for favoring progressive politics. Read all about it in a post I wrote for my other blog, "Science supports a progressive political agenda."

December 08, 2011

He observes that gay and atheist presidents didn't get us into wars or financial crises. No, "It took some God-fearing vagina penetrators to pull that off." The solution: "Leave the governing to sodomites and infidels."

November 29, 2011

I don't understand why there's so much concern about "Islamists" being voted into power in Egypt. Fundamentalist Christians do their best to dominate politics in the United States. So do fundamentalist Jews in Israel.

Why isn't there an equally fervent outcry about "Christianists" or "Judaists" taking over? Well, there is. Andrew Sullivan wrote a good piece about this back in 2006.

So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam.

Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all.

I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

November 09, 2011

I liked this column by E.J. Dionne a lot. "Election 2012's Great Religious Divide" makes some excellent points about how religion and politics intersect here in the United States.

Yes, everyone is part of a religious minority. Especially atheists and agnostics, since the vast majority of Americans are believers in some faith.

In the United States, we have no religious tests for office. It’s true that this constitutional provision does not prevent a voter from casting a ballot on any basis he or she wishes to use. Nonetheless, it’s the right assumption for citizens in a pluralistic democracy.

All Americans ought to empathize with religious minorities because each of us is part of one. If Mormonism can be held against Romney and Huntsman, then everyone else’s tradition — and, for nonbelievers, their lack of religious affiliation — can be held against them, too. We have gone down this road before. Recall the ugly controversy over Catholicism when Al Smith and John F. Kennedy sought the presidency. We shouldn’t want to repeat the experiences of 1928 or 1960.

But this doesn't mean religion should be off-limits when questioning a candidate about his/her qualifications for office.

As Dionne says, candidates can't brag about how important faith is to them, yet resist queries about how that faith would influence their decision-making.

Religious people cannot have it both ways: to assert that their faith really matters to their public engagement, and then to insist, when it’s convenient, that religion is a matter about which no one has a right to ask questions. Voters especially have a right to know how a candidate’s philosophical leanings shape his or her attitudes toward the religious freedom of unbelievers as well as believers.

And here’s the hardest part: We all have to ask ourselves whether what we claim to be hearing as the voice of faith (or of God) may in fact be nothing more than the voice of our ideology or political party. We should also ask whether candidates are merely exploiting religion to rally some part of the electorate to their side. The difficulty of answering both questions — given the human genius for rationalization — might encourage a certain humility that comes hard to most of us, and perhaps, above all, to people who write opinion columns.

Here's a good example of how religion intrudes upon seemingly purely secular issues.

Who knew that the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. "Obamacare") interfered with a religious person's ability to rely on God? Fortunately, a U.S. Appeals Court thought otherwise in upholding the Affordable Care Act's constitutionality.

The U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia has upheld a lower court’s ruling in a 2-to-1 vote that the “individual mandate” is constitutional, reports the Associated Press.

The original suit was brought by the American Center for Law and Justice – a legal group created by evangelist Pat Robertson. It claims the individual mandate – which requires everyone to buy health insurance or else face a penalty – violates the religious freedom of those who choose to rely on God to protect them.

Today George, a regular visitor to this blog, left a comment on a post which said, in part: "one thing i would like to know is how come all you guys are besotted with conspiracy theories and the occult?"

That got me to thinking again about why conspiracy theories are so attractive, even to people who decry religious beliefs that aren't evidence-based. A few months ago I wrote a post called "Conspiracy theories -- another form of blind faith."

No need to repeat why I said there. But who needs a need to do something? Here's how the post started out:

One person believes that Jesus was resurrected after dying on the cross. Another person believes that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks.

Each belief lacks a foundation of demonstrable evidence. Each belief almost certainly is untrue. Each belief has many adherents who vehemently hold to it, despite how bizarre their blind faith is.

I'm a religious skeptic. I'm also a conspiracy theory skeptic. What seems strange to me is how people who decry fundamentalist religion often cling to fundamentalist conspiracy theories.

Now, it's absolutely true that what currently seems to be true, may not be. So I'm not against wild, crazy, blue sky notions that turn consensal reality upside down. Or at least, would, if they were more than just notions.

Einstein often is used as an example of a solitary individual who looked at the world in a markedly different way and ended up overturning generally held beliefs that seemed to be solidly proven. Yes, he did. But here's the big difference between Einstein and conspiracy theorists:

Einstein backed up his theories with solid evidence that could be confirmed by other experts. After some initial scepticism, It didn't take long for the physics community to embrace the theory of relativity.

Why? Because it was true.

But when someone claims that a shadowy group of Jewish financiers (or whoever) are out to control the world economy and create a New World Order, this is a remarkable claim that deserves equally remarkable evidence to back it up.

Which, of course, doesn't exist outside of the minds of conspiracy theorists who believe that only they have been able to connect the dots and reveal a perspective on reality everyone else has missed --including professional historians, economists, and political scientists who devote their lives to understanding what is happening in their corner of the knowledge world, yet somehow are blind to truths that conspiracy theorists easily recognize.

Religious faith operates in the same fashion. The human drive to make sense of the world is powerful and innate. When things don't make sense, our brains love to conjure up stories that neatly organizes reality into something comprehensible.

Problem is, imagination isn't truth. Absent evidence, neither religious dogmas nor conspiracy theories should be looked upon as anything more than fantasies. Or more charitably, as hypotheses without factual support.

October 24, 2011

I've argued before that religious beliefs have no place in politics. (See here, here, and here.) This isn't the same as saying that religious people can't be politically active. Heck, if that were the case the vast majority of American citizens would be apolitical.

I just feel that when it comes to policy-making, elected officials should offer up good reasons for why they want to do X rather than Y. Then those who disagree with that choice can engage in a rational debate rather than being met with a faith-based "just because."

Pastor Robert Jeffress has a different point of view.

And even though I find most of his arguments in "Why a candidate's faith matters" unconvincing, I have to give Jeffress credit for being a straightforward, honest, engaging advocate for his Christian religion. (Jeffress has taken heat for calling Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Mormon faith a "cult," which of course it is -- along with every other religion, including mainstream Christianity).

On a recent episode of his HBO "Real Time" program, Bill Maher interviewed Jeffress. I found the pastor eminently likable, even as my churchless psyche found his fundamentalist attitudes decidedly unappealing.

Interestingly, John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court and co-author of the Federalist Papers, thought a candidate’s religious beliefs should be a primary consideration in voting. Jay wrote, “It is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation, to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.” According to Jay, preferring a Christian candidate is neither bigoted nor unconstitutional.

Second, discussion of a candidate’s faith is relevant. During a time of rising unemployment, falling home prices and massive deficits, it is easy to relegate religion as an irrelevant topic. Yet our religious beliefs define the very essence of who we are. Any candidate who claims his religion has no influence on his decisions is either a dishonest politician or a shallow follower of his faith.

...Conservatives spent most of the 2008 election calling for an investigation of Barack Obama’s religious beliefs in relationship to his membership in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. Did he embrace the views of his pastor? Again, a fair question because no religion I’m familiar with allows for a separation of faith from behavior. The question is not whether personal spiritual beliefs shape a politician’s values and policies, but what spiritual beliefs mold those values and policies.

Well, I wish this wasn't the case, because I'd much prefer that our nation's policies be based on facts and values that aren't contaminated by religious dogma. As noted above, when people are unable to offer up solid reasons for why X is preferable to Y, debate quickly degenerates into a "my weird belief is better than your weird belief" exchange that is inimical to open-minded discussion.

I have to admit, though, that Jeffress is telling it like it is.

The United States is a deeply religious nation, god damn it! Atheists and agnostics are a tiny minority of voters. It's difficult to imagine someone non-religious being elected president, or any leader of our country failing to end a State of the Union speech with "And may God bless the United States of America."

So my fallback position is to reluctantly accept that religious values are going to be part of our political discourse. Given that fact, I'll agree with Pastor Jeffress' contention that discussion of a candidate's faith is relevant.

Back in 2007 I said, "Questioning a politician's religious belief isn't unconstitutional." Indeed, it is essential so long as candidates embrace other-worldly beliefs that affect their preferred policy prescriptions. Here's an excerpt from that blog post:

However, the framers of the Constitution didn't intend religion to be off limits when considering a candidate's qualifications. The Republican presidential candidates, though, want to have it both ways.

They bring up their religious beliefs at every opportunity. Then when someone asks them to answer some specifics about those beliefs, such as whether every word in the Bible is to be taken literally, they're offended that this oh-so-personal aspect of their lives is being brought out for public scrutiny.

Well, if you don't want your religious belief scrutinized, keep it to yourself. If you're running for office, say "I'm a religious person, but my beliefs won't have any impact on how I go about deciding political or policy questions."

If you can't say that, then you've got to expect some serious questioning about what sort of unsubstantiated, subjective, and unscientific world view is going to support your decisions if you're elected.

Will Zeus guide your thoughts and actions? Or God? How about Jesus? And how will you know what your divine source of inspiration requires of you? Do you pray? Study a holy book? Hear messages from above in your head?

These are important and valid questions. I just wish they were asked more often at press conferences and debates.

September 22, 2011

Tonight, during a wine tasting event, I chatted with a guy about the dismal state of national and international politics.

Opposing positions have gotten absurdly extreme. Republicans have almost nothing in common with Democrats. Israelis have almost nothing in common with Palestinians. With such little common ground, there's no room for two parties at odds with each other to negotiate a mutually acceptable deal.

We talked about how both Jewish Israelis and Muslim Palestinians have an absurd belief that the territory Israel occupied in the 1967 war is "holy" or a "promised land." Absurd, because these religious claims are based on Jewish and Muslim dogmas.

So the supposed truth that Jews are entitled to ownership of the "Holy Land" is founded on statements in a Jewish holy book. Ditto with Palestinian claims to their own holy places, though these don't seem as extreme to me as hard line Israeli faith-based political positions.

There seems to be no end to the haggling over whether, or how, Palestinian statehood should be accomplished. Tomorrow it looks like the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, will ask the U.N. General Assembly for recognition.

That request likely won't succeed, partly because the United States has tied itself so tightly to Israel (every president lusts after Jewish votes and political contributions), it isn't possible for this country to forcefully push for the "two state" solution reasonable people recognize as the only fair way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

My wine-tasting companion and I agreed that religion makes the problem much worse. Jews and Christians feel that the "Holy Land" has to stay in the hands of Israel, because this is what the Bible demands, or at least strongly implies.

Where, then, is the wiggle-room for negotiating land swaps with the Palestinian Authority, if fundamentalist Jewish and Christian organizations are convinced that Israel is doing God's will by holding on to land that supposedly is a divine promise to the Jews?

I don't get it when people say, "Religion is a force for good, not for harm."

Just look at Israel and Palestine. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have taken over sixty years, and coiunting, to resolve their conflicts if religious dogma wasn't making both sides feel that their position is divinely inspired.

August 31, 2011

Sure, virtually every politician in the United States who occupies a high office will be religious, because this is a highly religious country and voters are biased against atheists. But political decisions should be based on evidence, reasoning, values -- not blind faith in some supernatural force.

Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times, who is about to step down and become a full-time writer, wrote a great piece: Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith. Which starts off...

If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him? Personally, I might not disqualify him out of hand; one out of three Americans believe we have had Visitors and, hey, who knows? But I would certainly want to ask a few questions. Like, where does he get his information? Does he talk to the aliens? Do they have an economic plan?

Yet when it comes to the religious beliefs of our would-be presidents, we are a little squeamish about probing too aggressively. Michele Bachmann was asked during the Iowa G.O.P. debate what she meant when she said the Bible obliged her to “be submissive” to her husband, and there was an audible wave of boos — for the question, not the answer. There is a sense, encouraged by the candidates, that what goes on between a candidate and his or her God is a sensitive, even privileged domain, except when it is useful for mobilizing the religious base and prying open their wallets.

Exactly.

Candidates try to have it both ways: they shamelessly use their religiosity to form a bond with like-minded voters, yet get offended when someone asks them probing questions about their beliefs.

Like, "How the hell can we expect that you'd make sound presidential decisions when you believe such ridiculous faith-based religious crap?" That's the sort of question I'd like to ask, but it likely would get me thrown out of a Bachmann campaign event.

Keller, though, is free to ask some excellent questions of the candidates in a companion piece, Tougher Questions for the Candidates. My favorite is:

3. (a) Do you agree with those religious leaders who say that America is a “Christian nation” or “Judeo-Christian nation?” (b) What does that mean in practice?

Americans get all freaked out when Muslim nations are led by someone who vows fealty to the teachings of the Koran. Yet voters applaud presidential candidates who pledge to bring the Bible back into the classroom and eliminate barriers between church and state.

Huh?

How is it that an Islamic theocracy is bad, while a Christian theocracy is good? What distinguishes our political leaders from fundamentalist crazies in other nations if both believe in seriously strange stuff that has no connection to demonstrable reality?

On that note, Keller has a link to a 2004 story about the Bush administration's snide dismissal of "the reality-based community," of which I am a proud member. Browsing through the lengthy story, I came across this.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''

There are plenty of domineering, blustering jerks who try to get their way through force, intimidation, tough talk, and stonewalling. Their jerkiosity isn't always faith-based. But often it is.

Religions can bring out the worst in people.

Especially in politicians who already are prone to delusions of grandiosity. it's dangerous when a national leader believes that he or she has a direct personal link to God's will, as this can lead them to pursue policies which have no good reasons behind them other than "I feel it in my gut." (Meaning, the brain's blind faith center.)

Reader comments on New York Times articles often are as thoughtful as the piece itself. Highlighted comments on Heller's piece were no exception. I liked this one from Roxanne M. in New Mexico.

In his autobiography, former French President Jacques Chirac described receiving a call from President Bush in the middle of the night on the eve of the Iraq war. Bush was musing about whether his actions in the Middle East might help to fulfill the divine plan by bringing about Armageddon. The voters have a right to know whether their president's policies are based on rational evidence and suppositions or on crazy religious wish-fulfillment.

Religious beliefs are just that--beliefs. We have no problem questioning a candidates beliefs about economics, social policy or international relations, and expecting him to be able to defend those beliefs on a rational basis. Religion, however, has enjoyed a privileged, off-limits status that may have been fine, back in the good old days when all candidates were conventionally religious, usually Episcopalian, and weren't trying to use their faith as a wedge issue. But when candidates seem to think there is a higher law than the Constitution they are sworn to uphold, it's relevant to know which parts of the Constitution would be at risk under their administration.

August 07, 2011

Reading about Texas Governor Rick Perry's prayer rally, which likely is a kickoff to him becoming a Republican candidate for president of the United States, I wonder how his religious fanaticism would be viewed if he were a Muslim speaking of the need for people to embrace Allah and the Koran in order to return our nation to greatness.

"Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government, and as a nation we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that we cry out for your forgiveness," Perry said.

If someone seeking to lead Egypt talked in this fashion about how Islam had to be the foundation of that country's political processes, lots of Americans would worry about the dangers of Muslim extremism.

But Christian extremism is OK to them. Hypocrisy is running wild in the Republican party these days. In non-Christian countries, they favor "separation of church and state." In the United States, though, bringing God into politics is just fine.

January 13, 2011

President Obama's speech at yesterday's memorial service for the victims of the Tucson shooting inspired me. So I wanted to share some excerpts from his remarks which bear on any sort of discourse -- including "conversations" on this blog and elsewhere on the Internet.

(Since quite a few visitors here live overseas, a brief background on the events that have shaken up the United States: last Saturday a Congresswoman, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head by a young man, Jared Loughner, as she was speaking with constituents in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords survived, but six other people were killed by Loughner and many others were hurt.)

Obama said:

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations –- to try and pose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health system. And much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized -– at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -– it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.

These are nicely nuanced thoughts. I get passionate about the dangers of religiosity. Other people are avid defenders of their faith. Spiritual beliefs, or the lack thereof, are akin to the Tucson shootings in this regard: they aren't easily explained.

In fact, I'll go further and say neither can be explained.

The human mind/brain is way too complex and mysterious to be reduced in a simplistic fashion. Thoughts, motivations, emotions, desires, yearnings -- all these and so much more are beyond the ability of anyone, including the individual in whose head all these transpire, to comprehend.

So when some commentators say, "Jared Loughner certainly wasn't affected by hateful, violent political speech," they're just guessing. And when other commentators say that Loughner definitely was spurred on by talk radio or cable TV, they're also guessing.

Likewise, I do my best on this blog to stay away from making inferences about what is, or was, in someone else's mind, since even that person isn't capable of figuring out how unconscious processes in his or her brain end up producing thoughts, emotions, or actions.

All we can do, really, is speak about how we see the world and ourselves.

Yes, it's important that we learn how to talk with each other. But I see this talking as akin to laying our conversational cards on the table in a shared, open space. We shouldn't try to force our own cards into the hand (or mind) of someone else. That, as Obama said, is a way that wounds.

He went on to observe:

As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.

Absolutely.

However, I don't take those two sentences as reflecting any sort of passivity in the face of social, cultural, environmental, political, or other sorts of problems that need to be dealt with.

We are still entitled to hold strong opinions and passionate views. We just should recognize that everybody, including our opponents, are trying to deal with life in the best way they know how. It's important to remember that humans have a lot more in common, than in difference.

Like, how we deal with grief:

So sudden loss causes us to look backward -– but it also forces us to look forward; to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us.

We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we're doing right by our children, or our community, whether our priorities are in order.

We recognize our own mortality, and we are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this Earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame -– but rather, how well we have loved -- and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better.

And that process -- that process of reflection, of making sure we align our values with our actions –- that, I believe, is what a tragedy like this requires.

Each of us is the meaning-maker of our own life.

Yes, we are affected by other people, influenced by natural events, constrained by our predispositions (genetic and otherwise), mystified by unconscious neurological processes over which we have little or no control.

But in the end, we are still responsible for how our unique human consciousness makes sense of all this, and how we treat other people and sentient creatures who are trying to figure out life in their own fashion.

This final excerpt from Obama's speech is my favorite:

If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate -- as it should -- let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better. To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy -- it did not -- but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.

As I'vee observed numerous times during the six-plus years since I started this Church of the Churchless blog, we should talk with each other on the Internet no differently than if we were sitting face to face in a coffehouse.

Yet just as "talking heads" on the radio or TV can be astoundingly vitriolic, insulting, and hateful toward people with whom they disagree, so can the distancing anonymity of the Internet foster speech which makes me go "Wow! If this person was in the same room with those he's ranting to, he or she wouldn't be talking that way."

I enjoy conversing on the Internet for the same reason I like talking with people in person: learning, sharing, entertainment, friendship-making, exposure to fresh ideas. May this blog continue to bring enjoyment to me and to others who visit it.

And may our discourse here, as elsewhere, be as civil and honest as possible.

November 13, 2010

Here's a great example of why personal religious beliefs should be kept out of public policy debates: Illinois Congressman John Shimkus citing Genesis in support of his contention that global warming is nothing to worry about.

He's standing by his remarks, made in 2009, that everything will be fine because God promised He wouldn't destroy the Earth after Noah's flood.

The Illinois Republican running for the powerful perch atop the House Energy and Commerce Committee told POLITICO on Wednesday that his understanding of the Bible reaffirms his belief that government shouldn't be in the business of trying to address rising greenhouse gas emissions.

"I do believe in the Bible as the final word of God," Shimkus said. "And I do believe that God said the Earth would not be destroyed by a flood.

Truly bizarre. Even more astonishing is that many Americans undoubtedly feel it's perfectly OK to base vitally important national policy decisions on myths from a pre-scientific era.

Well, we're in for a rough couple of years in Congress if Republicans allow legislation to be based on weird religious beliefs rather than solid facts. Openly debating the science of climate change is one thing; sticking one's head in the sand and spouting scripture is wholly/holy different.

Like I said before, and surely will say again, "Religious values have no place in politics."